Metabolic Activity Grows in Human Cancers Pushed by Phenotypic Variability

Overview

Journal iScience

Publisher Cell Press

Date 2023 Feb 27

PMID 36843844

Authors

Jesus J Bosque

Gabriel F Calvo

David Molina-Garcia

Julian Perez-Beteta

Ana M Garcia Vicente

Victor M Perez-Garcia

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Different evolutionary processes push cancers to increasingly aggressive behaviors, energetically sustained by metabolic reprogramming. The collective signature emerging from this transition is macroscopically displayed by positron emission tomography (PET). In fact, the most readily PET measure, the maximum standardized uptake value (SUV), has been found to have prognostic value in different cancers. However, few works have linked the properties of this metabolic hotspot to cancer evolutionary dynamics. Here, by analyzing diagnostic PET images from 512 patients with cancer, we found that SUV scales superlinearly with the mean metabolic activity (SUV), reflecting a dynamic preferential accumulation of activity on the hotspot. Additionally, SUV increased with metabolic tumor volume (MTV) following a power law. The behavior from the patients data was accurately captured by a mechanistic evolutionary dynamics model of tumor growth accounting for phenotypic transitions. This suggests that non-genetic changes may suffice to fuel the observed sustained increases in tumor metabolic activity.

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