BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Hitting cancer's sweet spot

April 3, 2008 7:00 AM UTC

Two reports published back to back in Nature provide the missing piece in a long-standing mystery about why cancers use glycolysis, rather than respiration, to fuel growth.1,2 The findings provide a mechanistic explanation for this metabolic process, called the Warburg effect after its discoverer, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Otto Warburg.

Warburg and others were convinced that glycolysis under aerobic conditions may be at the root of cancer,3 but the idea fell out of fashion several decades ago with the discovery of oncogenes. The new findings, together with other recent studies,4,5 bring aerobic glycolysis back into focus for cancer therapeutics...