How Drugs Change Cancer Cell Metabolism

Drugs don't always stop cancer cells from growing, but they often mess with their metabolism. Scientists used a high-tech method, called metabolomics, to see how 1, 520 drugs affected 2, 269 potential metabolites in A549 lung cancer cells. Even though only 26% of the drugs slowed down cell growth, a whopping 86% caused changes inside the cells. These changes were similar in other cancer cell lines too. By testing over 3. 4 million drug-metabolite combinations, they created a handy reference table. This table lets researchers quickly see how drugs interfere with cell metabolism. This is like speeding up the process of understanding how drugs work. Surprisingly, they found new effects of drugs that we didn't know about before. This means we might be able to use these drugs in new ways to treat diseases. They confirmed these findings for four new glucocorticoid receptor agonists, two unusual HMGCR inhibitors, and two DHODH inhibitors. This study shows that looking at cell metabolism can help us figure out how drugs work. It can also make the process of finding new drugs faster, bigger, and more accurate. This is great news for preclinical drug discovery.