- Person
- Otto Warburg
- Lived
- 1883–1970
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German
The story
In the 1920s Otto Warburg showed that cancer cells take up far more glucose than most normal tissues and ferment much of it into lactic acid, even when oxygen is plentiful. For half a century this remained a laboratory finding, important to biochemists but of no direct use at a patient's bedside.
Nuclear medicine changed that. In 1968 chemists at Charles University in Prague first described how to make fluorodeoxyglucose, or FDG, a close chemical relative of glucose. In the 1970s Tatsuo Ido and Al Wolf at Brookhaven National Laboratory made a version labelled with radioactive fluorine-18, and in August 1976 Abass Alavi at the University of Pennsylvania gave it to the first two human volunteers. In 1980 researchers found that the tracer builds up in tumours, the discovery that set PET on the way to becoming a major tool in cancer diagnosis.
The method works because of the Warburg effect. Cells that use a lot of glucose absorb the tracer along with ordinary sugar. Once inside, the enzyme hexokinase attaches a phosphate group to it, but because FDG lacks one of glucose's hydroxyl groups the cell cannot break it down any further, so it stays trapped. Malignant tumours, which consume glucose so hungrily, collect more tracer than the tissue around them, and the scanner shows them as bright spots. Fluorine-18 has a half-life of about 110 minutes, short enough to fade from the body within a day but long enough for the tracer to be shipped from a cyclotron to hospitals some distance away.
Today FDG is the standard tracer for PET imaging in cancer care. Doctors use the scans to find tumours, judge whether they have spread and check whether treatment is working, and the same tracer is used to study how the brain and heart use glucose. Each scan is, in effect, a picture of the Warburg effect inside a living patient.
It is a rare case of a basic laboratory finding about cell chemistry becoming a routine part of medicine decades after it was made. Warburg measured tumour metabolism with glass flasks and pressure gauges; today his observation helps guide cancer care in hospitals around the world.
Why it matters
By showing where tumours are and how they respond to therapy, FDG-PET scans built on Warburg's discovery have become a standard part of cancer diagnosis and treatment planning.
About Otto Warburg
Biochemist who uncovered how cells breathe and discovered that tumours burn sugar by fermentation, the “Warburg effect”; Nobel laureate in 1931 who kept working in Nazi Berlin as a “Mischling.”
More about Otto Warburg
- Otto Warburg found that cancer cells crave sugarBeginning in 1922, Otto Warburg discovered that tumour cells break down glucose into lactic acid even when oxygen is plentiful, a hallmark of cancer now called the Warburg effect.
- Otto Warburg used light to unmask an invisible enzymeOtto Warburg showed that carbon monoxide blocks cell breathing and that light lifts the block, and used this trick to read the chemical signature of the respiratory enzyme.
- Otto Warburg built the tools of modern biochemistryOtto Warburg introduced the thin tissue-slice technique in 1923 and refined manometric methods for measuring how living tissue consumes oxygen, tools used in labs for decades.
- Otto Warburg discovered how cells use oxygenOtto Warburg identified the iron-containing enzyme that lets living cells use oxygen, winning the unshared 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- Otto Warburg measured life's first breath in an eggWorking at the Naples marine station before the First World War, Otto Warburg showed that a sea urchin egg's respiration rises sharply the moment it is fertilised.
- Otto Warburg revealed the helper molecules of metabolismIn the 1930s Otto Warburg discovered the yellow enzymes and identified flavin and nicotinamide as the active parts of the enzymes that move hydrogen in living cells.
Sources
- Warburg effect (oncology) Wikipedia
- Otto Heinrich Warburg Wikipedia
- Fluorodeoxyglucose (18F) Wikipedia
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