Regulation of aerobic glycolysis to decelerate tumor proliferation by small molecule inhibitors targeting glucose transporters

Dear Editor, Different from normal differentiated cells,metabolic reprogramming was spotted in cancer cells,due to increased demand for energy and macromolecule synthesis during their rapid proliferation (Hanahan and Weinberg,2011;Pavlova and Thompson,2016).Most cancer cells prefer anaerobic glycolysis even with oxygen in the environment due to its higher speed to produce macromolecular materials required for biosynthesis (Vander Heiden et al.,2009;DeBerardinis and Chandel,2016).But to compensate for the lower efficiency of anaerobic glycolysis in producing ATP,these cancer cells demand much higher glucose supply (Warburg,1956;Vander Heiden et al.,2009).These metabolic characteristics point to the huge demand of cancer cells for carbohydrate substrates,which creates the possibility of treating tumors by exploiting this feature (Patra et al.,2013;DeBerardinis and Chandel,2016).