20世纪20年代,奥托·瓦博格首次发现肿瘤细胞在正常氧的情况下优先利用糖酵解的现象.近一个世纪以来,细胞代谢在肿瘤发生发展中的作用引起了广泛的关注.其基本机制是肿瘤细胞在营养匮乏的环境中通过劫持、重塑不同的细胞代谢途径,包括合成和分解途径,从而为其生存和增殖提供生物大分子原料;而这些代谢途径改变和代谢物的变化通过转录、表观、翻译和翻译后修饰等不同机制来调控细胞的生命活动,从而在肿瘤发生发展中起着至关重要的作用.因此,代谢异常是肿瘤的十大特征之一.近年来,随着对癌基因和抑癌基因的突变以及各类生长因子和下游信号通路的深入研究,特别是近十年对肿瘤细胞所处的微环境在肿瘤发生发展中的关键作用不断阐明,人们逐步认识到肿瘤细胞和其所处微环境的相互作用对肿瘤代谢的重塑产生重要的影响,因此揭示微环境对肿瘤细胞代谢的调控机制,将为肿瘤的诊断和治疗提供新的靶点和合理化治疗方案,从而提高肿瘤病人的生存率及其生活质量.
Cell metabolism has been widely studied in cancer development since Otto Warburg' s description of overwhelmed glycolysis in cancer cells in the 1920s. Accumulated evidence demonstrates that cancer cells upon hypoxia and nutrient stress could hijack and reprogram variously metabolic pathways, including anabolism and catabolism, to produce essential precursors for biomass synthesis to sustain cell survival and proliferation. In addition, metabolic alterations control cellular events at multiple levels such as transcription, epigenetics, translation and posttranslational modification, eventually play an essential role during cancer initiation and progression. Therefore, dysregulation of cancer metabolism has been generally recognized as one of the ten hallmarks of cancer. During last three decades, especially in the recent decade, studies on oncogenes, tumor suppressors, growth factor-associated signaling pathways, and cancer microenvironment, which sequentially take center stage of cancer biology research, reveal that the cancer metabolism is regulated by reciprocal interaction between cancer cells and surrounding microenvironment. Elucidating the function and mechanism of cancer microenvironment-mediated metabolism reprogramming will provide potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets and fundamentally improve diagnosis and prognosis of cancer patients.