Abstract IA18: Cancer metabolism: Emerging insights from single cell analysis

Abstract

Abstract This presentation will focus on cancer metabolism and new insights that can be gained from emerging technologies – notably single cell analysis. I will first provide a brief overview of our laboratory's research program around metabolism, emphasizing the research questions we focus on as well as the technologies we've been developing and implementing. I will next discuss work on the development of computational tools using single cell expression data to investigate metabolic networks and pathway activity in single cells to study metabolism in vivo. I will show how this technology can be used to gain insights into metabolism within the tumor microenvironment in human tumors. I will next present an application of this technology in the study a therapeutic our lab has been studying, digoxin – a cardiac glycoside that is under consideration for repurposing in cancer and which we show to target glucose and central carbon metabolism. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that remodeling of the immune compartment can be achieved upon introduction of this metabolic agent.