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IMAGE: (left to right) Kimryn Rathmell, Bradley Reinfeld, Matthew Madden and Jeffrey Rathmell have discovered that immune cells not cancer cells are the major glucose consumers in the tumor. view more
Credit: Susan Urmy/VUMC
Tumors consume glucose at high rates, but a team of Vanderbilt researchers has discovered that cancer cells themselves are not the culprit, upending models of cancer metabolism that have been developed and refined over the last 100 years.
Instead, non-cancer cells in a tumor primarily immune cells called macrophages have the highest glucose uptake, the group reported April 7 in the journal