Abstract
Altered metabolism in cancer was first discovered by Otto Warburg early last century. Although the Warburg Effect has been widely used in tumor detection, relatively little progress had been made in mechanistic understanding of cancer metabolism in the subsequent eight decades. Genetic studies have recently identified mutations in human cancer targeting multiple enzymes involved in intermediate metabolism. One emerging mechanism common to these mutant enzymes is the accumulation of a metabolite that alters the epigenetic control.
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Dr. Guan KunLiang is a professor at the Department of Pharmacology, University of California San Diego (2007-present). He received his B.S. degree (1982) from Hangzhou University, China. As a fellow of the second class of CUSBEA, he attended Purdue University and received both his Ph.D. (1989) and postdoctoral training at Purdue University. Dr. Guan started as an assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (1992) and was promoted to full Professor in 2000. He was later appointed as the Halvor Christensen Professor (2003) at the University of Michigan. He received the MacArthur Fellowship (1998), Scherling-Plaugh Award (1999), and Distinguished Alumni Award (2006) at Purdue University, and was elected to Fellow of AAAS (2011). Dr. Guan studies signaling mechanisms of organ size control and tumorigenesis, with particular focus on the mTOR and Hippo pathways.
Dr. Xiong Yue is currently the William. R. Kenan Professor at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He obtained his B.S. degree in molecular biology from Fudan University in 1982. As a fellow of the CUSBEA class, he joined the University of Rochester as a predoctoral student and then began his postdoctoral training in Dr. David Beach’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Xiong started his own lab in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. His research mainly focuses on the mechanisms of cell proliferation and tumorigenesis. In 2006, Dr. Xiong Yue together with Dr. Guan KunLiang started the Molecular Cell Biology (MCB) lab in Fudan University to study metabolism alterations in human diseases. Dr. Xiong received the Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences (1995), AACR Gertrude B. Elion Cancer Research Award (1999) and was elected as an AAAS fellow (2011). Dr. Yang Hui is a doctoral student at Fudan University and is supervised by Drs. Xiong and Guan. He graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2008 and joined the MCB lab at Fudan University. Dr. Yang’s Ph.D. research mainly focuses on the dynamic regulation of epigenetic modifications by metabolites. He received the Ray Wu Prize in 2012.
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Yang, H., Xiong, Y. & Guan, K. Metabolic alteration in tumorigenesis. Sci. China Life Sci. 56, 1067–1075 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-013-4549-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-013-4549-2