CBCB faculty Eytan Ruppin’s group publish a review paper in Molecular Systems Biology on genome-scale modeling of cancer metabolism describing current accomplishments and future challenges
Cancer cells have fundamentally altered cellular metabolism that is associated with their tumorigenicity and malignancy. In addition to the widely studied Warburg effect, several new key metabolic alterations in cancer have been established over the last decade, leading to the recognition that altered tumor metabolism is one of the hallmarks of cancer. Deciphering the full scope and functional implications of the dysregulated metabolism in cancer requires both the advancement of a variety of omics measurements and the advancement of computational approaches for the analysis and contextualization of the accumulated data. Encouragingly, while the metabolic network is highly interconnected and complex, it is at the same time probably the best characterized cellular network. Following, these researchers discuss the challenges that genome‐scale modeling of cancer metabolism has been facing. They survey several recent studies demonstrating the first strides that have been done, testifying to the value of this approach in portraying a network‐level view of the cancer metabolism and in identifying novel drug targets and biomarkers. Finally, they outline a few new steps that may further advance this field.
“Modeling cancer metabolism on a genome scale” article: http://msb.embopress.org/content/11/6/817