Metabolic Reprogramming: Implications in Cancer, Immune Surveillance and Regenerative Medicine

Dear Colleagues,

Metabolic reprogramming is a switch in metabolism that cells adopt to support an increased proliferative capacity or to undertake a specific differentiation pathway, and the most paradigmatic examples of these are cancer cells and stem cells, respectively.

Cancer cells show distinct metabolic phenotypes in order to cope with the energetic and metabolic demands required to support tumor growth and progression. Immune cells, including T-lymphocytes, natural killer cells, and macrophages, play a key role in providing broad spectrum protection that serves to eradicate cancerous cells. However, the abnormal metabolic activities of cancer cells influence the nutrient states of the tumor microenvironment (e.g., glucose, glutamine, lactate, and tryptophan-related metabolites such as kynurenine) and limit the antitumoral activity of immune cells. Indeed, tumors escape immunity by inducing metabolic switches in immune cells which lead to immune dysfunction characterized by attenuated tumoricidal effector functions of TILs, such as a minor IFNγ production and cytotoxicity.

Metabolic reprogramming also plays a fundamental role in the regulation of cell fate, and specific metabolic switches occur during the transitions between different pluripotent states as well as during the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) through somatic reprogramming. Moreover, recent evidence shows that metabolic reprogramming and specific metabolites drive the differentiation pathways of hematopoietic and skeletal muscle tissue stem cells, with fundamental implications for regenerative medicine.

For this Special Issue, we invite research or review articles on metabolic reprogramming of cancer and immune cells as well as stem cells and somatic cells which acquire pluripotency.

Prof. Giuseppe Fiume
Prof. Camillo Palmieri
Prof. Maurizio Renna
Prof. Massimo D’Agostino
Guest Editors

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