From the Warburg effect to the latest in cancer research

Дата создания : 2021-06-17 Просмотров : 348
From the Warburg effect to the latest in cancer research

Almost 100 years ago, the German scientist Otto Warburg discovered the effect with which his name has become inextricably linked. Put simply, Warburg described an observation about the nature of energy production in tumor cells that revealed a fundamental truth – one that still underlies much of the way we think about, and treat cancer.

In a landmark paper,1 Warburg demonstrated that cancer cells are not simply normal cells that divide faster; cancer cells are fundamentally different from the normal cells from which they arise, even in their basic intracellular physiology.

Now referred to as the Warburg effect, this idea – and the metabolic observations that support it – continue to drive advances in cancer research. In fact, the 2006 founding of Seahorse Bioscience (now a part of Agilent) was in some ways the result of an unmet need among researchers: to be able to examine the same sorts of metabolic processes observed by Warburg – with exquisite accuracy, precision, and throughput never before possible.

The man and his effect

Warburg set out in 1926 to test a fairly straightforward hypothesis: that because tumors grow faster than normal cells, cancer cells should have a higher rate of oxygen consumption than normal cells. He had shown such an increase in oxygen uptake in sea urchin eggs upon fertilization as far back as 1906. However, the results from rat liver tissue slices showed that oxygen consumption did not increase, but the production of lactic acid (measured indirectly by decreased pH and increased CO2 production), which normal cells produce only in anaerobic conditions, was much higher – 70-fold higher – than normal cells.

This presented a conundrum: although cancer cells can respire, in an aerobic state they used glycolytic pathways used by normal cells only in anaerobic conditions. Glycolysis in the presence of oxygen – aerobic glycolysis – is what came to be called the Warburg effect.

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