Metastatic-initiating cells and lipid metabolism
Authors:Salvador Aznar Benitah1,2
1 Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain.
2 Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain.
Keywords:
metastasis, metastatic-initiating cells, lipid metabolism, CD36, metabolic rewiring, diet, anti-metastatic therapy.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Salvador Aznar Benitah (2017). Metastatic-initiating cells and lipid metabolism. Cell Stress 1(3): 110-114. doi: 10.15698/cst2017.12.113
© 2017 Aznar Benitah. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
The identity of the cells responsible for initiating and promoting metastasis has been historically elusive. Consequently, this has hampered our ability to develop specific anti-metastatic treatments, resulting in the majority of metastatic cancers remaining clinically untreatable. Furthermore, advances in genome sequencing indicate that the acquisition of metastatic competency does not seem to involve the accumulation of de novo mutations, making it difficult to understand why some tumours become metastatic while others do not. We have recently identified metastatic-initiating cells, and described how they specifically rely on fatty acid uptake and lipid metabolism to promote metastasis. This intriguing finding indicates that external influences, such as those derived from our diet, exert a strong influence on tumour progression, and that such dietary factors could be therapeutically modulated if understood. In this News and Thoughts, I will comment on recent findings regarding how and why lipid metabolism modulates the behaviour of metastatic cells, and how this knowledge can be harnessed to devise new and specific anti-metastatic therapies.