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Cancer metabolism

Published on April 30, 2025   22 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Molecular Basis of Cancer

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0:00
Welcome to this introductory lecture on cancer metabolism. My name is Dr. Sophia Lunt, and I'm a professor in the Department of biochemistry and molecular biology at Michigan State University.
0:15
Life as we know it, ranging from humans to bacteria to plants, would not be possible without metabolism. Metabolism is often represented as a big, complicated pathway map like the one shown on the center of this slide. But if you boil it down, metabolism is a process in which you take in nutrients like food, water, and oxygen and convert them into the basic building blocks of life, DNA, RNA, protein, lipids, and energy. Metabolism has many applications in health and medicine, including drug efficacy. How well drugs work or do not work often depends on metabolism. Also, obesity and diabetes, which are growing problems in the United States as well as many other developed countries, and cancer. In fact, cancer cells have different metabolism compared to normal cells, and I will be discussing some of those differences in this lecture.
1:17
Metabolism is defined as the biochemical processes that occur within a living organism. It allows an organism to take nutrients from its environment and use them for maintenance, growth, and reproduction. Enzymes mediate many of these metabolic reactions.
1:39
Metabolism encompasses all reactions within a cell or an organism, and can be divided into two parts; Anabolism, which is the synthesis of larger macromolecules, and catabolism, which is the breakdown of organic molecules.

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