Crucial players in glycolysis: Cancer progress

Cancer is the second most important cause of death and new therapy modalities continue to be developed and evolved. Cancer cells’ metabolism is far different from the normal, healthy cells; they are more metabolically active, have higher proliferation rate and could able to resist to cell death pathways like apoptosis. It is known that in addition to increasing the expression of enzymes that are crucial in glycolysis for much more energy production, cancer cells produce energy from lactic acid fermentation after glycolysis. In 1920s, Warburg has claimed that cancer cells are more active in glycolysis than normal cells and use much more glucose in order to obtain more ATP for metabolic activities, then this is named as Warburg effect. After that; new methodologies and therapeutics that target metabolism, began to be attractive subject in cancer studies. Therefore, the main genes, enzymes and factors are begun to investigate and further studied for understanding their roles in metabolism of cancer cells.