Publication in FEBS Journal (Q1, IF 5.622)

The team of the Cell Physiology and Pathology Laboratory of the Research and Development Center of Biomedical Photonics at Orel State Unviersity, Orel Regional Clinical Hospital and University College London UCL (UK) published the article "Detection of NADH and NADPH levels in vivo identifies the shift of glucose metabolism in cancer to energy production" (Potapova E.V., Zherebtsov E.A., Shupletsov V.V., Dremin V.V., Kandurova K.Y., Mamoshin A.V., Abramov A.Y., Dunaev A.V.) in FEBS Journal (Q1, IF 5.622).

The possibility of studying metabolic changes in tumor cells in vivo by optical diagnostic methods opens wide perspectives both for diagnosis and clarification of further treatment strategy for patients and for search of therapeutic strategies for oncological treatment. The published article is devoted to the study of metabolic changes in liver tumor tissues ex vivo in a mouse model of hepatocellular carcinoma and in vivo in patients with this diagnosis.

The results showed an increase in the level of NADH (mainly responsible for energy metabolism) not only in the tumors, as expected, but also in the surrounding liver tissue. At the same time, tumor tissues also showed decreased levels of NADPH, reactive oxygen species production, and glutathione. Thus, the glucose-dependent production of NADH and NADPH in tumors underwent a significant shift toward energy production rather than NADPH synthesis to maintain redox balance.

Further studies will focus on collecting clinical data and looking for correlations between metabolic changes, type of liver tumor (primary or metastatic) and its aggressiveness.

The work, combining the development of a device for measuring fluorescence lifetime through a fine-needle probe and data analysis from the cell bioenergetics perspective, was performed under the Russian Science Foundation project No. 21-15-00325 " The development of multimodal optical diagnostic technology for analyzing the structural and functional state of the liver during percutaneous needle biopsy", as well as with the support of megagrant project No. 075-15-2022-1095 "Mitochondria as a Target in the Mechanism of Neurodegenerative Diseases".

Congratulations to our colleagues and our best wishes for success in new scientific research!

https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/febs.17067