Lactate has been found to provide fuel for growing tumors by scientists at the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI). This new finding, they say, may represent a major shift in how researchers view cancer metabolism and open a new avenue of study for therapies and imaging techniques for lung cancer.
"We were completely shocked by our findings," said Ralph DeBerardinis, professor at CRI, and director of CRI's Genetic and Metabolic Disease Program. "The oldest observation in cancer metabolism, the Warburg effect, says that lactate is a waste product of the tumor. This concept has driven the vast amount of research in the field. Our finding is a fundamental change in how we think about tumor metabolism."
In the study published in Cell this week, CRI researchers showed lactate is not only a waste product but also acts as a fuel source consumed by lung cancer cells growing in patients and mice. Combined with a previous study, also published in Cell, from the DeBerardinis lab that showed activated glucose oxidation in tumors, the results of this study are challenging the tenets of the Warburg effect.
"We believe that lactate is one of the fuels that supports growth, proliferation, and maybe even lung cancer metastases," Dr. DeBerardinis said. "Cancer metabolism is clinically actionable, and understanding the lactate pathway could help us find therapeutic targets for lung cancer. Lactate uptake could also have predictive value when used as an imaging tracer."
Additional findings in the study suggest a potential link between lactate use and cancer aggression.
"The findings are preliminary, but we did see a connection between lactate utilization and how quickly the tumors metastasized or recurred. This result suggests that there is something fundamental about the lactate utilization pathway that pertains to the clinical aggressiveness of the tumor," said Dr. Brandon Faubert, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Fellow at CRI and lead author of the study.