Hitting cancer's sweet spot

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...