Recent Advances in Drug Development Targeting Cancer Metabolism

Organotypic 3D decellularized matrix tumor spheroids for high-throughput drug screening

“…Such omic-based characterization is highly valuable from a bioengineering and medical perspective since it not only contributes to shed light on a major hallmark of human tumors, i.e., tumor metabolism, but also serves to possibly identify the feasibility of using co-culture dECM-Spheroid models as tools for screening candidate therapies that are specifically targeted to key tumor metabolic signatures. In fact, considering that the field of cancer metabolism and the screening of metabolism targeted therapeutics is rapidly evolving [108][109][110], the existence of metabolically characterized 3D in vitro platforms that can be used to screen targeted therapeutics may aid in accelerating the discovery/preclinical validation of metabolism targeted precision cancer therapies in the foreseeable future. Positive loadings correspond to metabolites increased in co-culture-derived media (positive LV1 scores) and negative loadings to metabolites more abundant in monoculture-derived media (negative LV1 scores); (B) Main metabolites consumed (negative fold change) and excreted (positive fold change) by monotypic and heterotypic 3D models.…”