utenzi

I work in cancer research and of late I've been investigating the affects of some chemicals on angiogenesis, particularly as it relates to breast cancer. Now I'm a technician, not a PI, so my nose is to the ground and I often miss the big picture since my concerns are oriented towards the day-to-day research. As a result, I often get tunnel vision and only look at cancer through the prism of my research. In this case that means that I frequently think of cancer as only developing when there's plenty of oxygen available--which is reasonable since as a fast dividing group of cells, a cancer tumor needs lots of energy which would seem to imply oxidative reduction, not glycolysis--which requires sufficient vascularization and thus angiogenesis. However the cancer picture is more complex than that and the Warburg Effect is one example of that. Some tumors actually preferentially grow in the absence of oxygen and use glycolysis as their primary source of energy. They do this by b...