Exploring host-tumour metabolic interactions using Drosophila

Exploring host-tumour metabolic interactions using Drosophila

Speaker: Dr Susumu Hirabayashi, MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, Imperial College London

Host: Dr Yutaka Matsubayashi 

Cancer is increasingly viewed as a systemic metabolic disease that associates with a range of host metabolic abnormalities such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer-associated cachexia, each of which alters the host metabolic and nutritional environment. Cancer cells actively acquire nutrients from the extracellular space to support their proliferation but how cancer cells sense and respond to nutritional changes in the context of organismal metabolic alterations remains an under-explored area in cancer biology. This is in part due to the complex interactions between cancer cells and their host tissues, which can only be studied in the whole-animal setting. We leverage fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a whole-animal model system to explore these host-tumour metabolic interactions. In this presentation, I will discuss how tumours utilise (i) glucose in response to diet-induced obesity and (ii) amino acids in response to cachexia-like muscle wasting. I also demonstrate that combining insights from whole-animal Drosophila models and human cancer database analysis provides a powerful approach towards the identification and therapeutic exploitation of the nutrient vulnerabilities of cancer.