Special Lecture

Deciphering cancer metabolism for drug discovery

Prof. Ulrich Günther

Metabolomics has gained significant ground in Biomedicine, including the field of cancer research. This is in part because metabolomics observes a phenotypical end point, reflecting small changes in various pathways linked to metabolism. Applications range from typical diagnostics to drug discovery. While the potential diagnostic value is increasingly accepted, the use of metabolomics for understanding the mechanisms of drug actions has been realized only more recently. Such developments are very closely linked to the fact that the aspect of altered metabolism in cancer has been rediscovered. Although known since Otto Warburg's research in the 1920s, metabolism has been neglected for a ling time. Now we find altered metabolism in different places of metabolic processing, and we learn how metabolism is affected by drugs. This has been studied in AML cells, where we have used redeployed drugs, and observe a pronounced metabolic effect arising linked to high levels of reactive oxygen species. For this we combined metabolomics with isotopic tracer based metabolic flux analysis to decipher changes in metabolism.