Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is predicted to become the second leading cause of death of patients with malignant cancers by 2030. Current options of PDAC treatment are limited and the five-year survival rate is less than 8%, leading to an urgent need to explore innovatively therapeutic strategies. PDAC cells exhibit extensively reprogrammed metabolism to meet their energetic and biomass demands under extremely harsh conditions. The metabolic changes are closely linked to signaling triggered by activation of oncogenes like KRAS as well as inactivation of tumor suppressors. Furthermore, tumor microenvironmental factors including extensive desmoplastic stroma reaction result in series of metabolism remodeling to facilitate PDAC development. In this review, we focus on the dysregulation of metabolism in PDAC and its surrounding microenvironment to explore potential metabolic targets in PDAC therapy.
Keywords: KRAS; PDAC; metabolism; tumor microenvironment.
Copyright: © 2019 Li et al.