Methods and Guidelines for Metabolism Studies: Applications to Cancer Research

Metabolism is a tightly controlled, but plastic network of pathways that allow cells to grow and maintain homeostasis. As a normal cell transforms into a malignant cancer cell and proliferates to establish a tumor, it utilizes a variety of metabolic pathways that support growth, proliferation, and survival. Cancer cells alter metabolic pathways in different contexts, leading to complex metabolic heterogeneity within a tumor. There is an unmet need to characterize how cancer cells alter how they use resources from the environment to evolve, spread to other sites of the body, and survive current standard-of-care therapies. We review key techniques and methods that are currently used to study cancer metabolism and provide drawbacks and considerations in using one over another. The goal of this review is to provide a methods’ guide to study different aspects of cell and tissue metabolism, how they can be applied to cancer, and discuss future perspectives on advancements in these areas.