Kidney cancer is a cancer with an increasing incidence in recent years. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) accounts for up to 80% of all kidney cancers. The understanding of the pathogenesis, tumor progression, and metastasis of renal carcinoma is not yet perfect. Kidney cancer has some characteristics that distinguish it from other cancers, and the metabolic aspect is the most obvious. The specificity of glucose and lipid metabolism in kidney cancer cells has also led to its being studied as a metabolic disease. As the most common type of kidney cancer, ccRCC has many characteristics that represent the specificity of kidney cancer. There are features that we are very concerned about, including the presence of lipid droplets in cells and the obesity paradox. These two points are closely related to glucose metabolism and lipid metabolism. Therefore, we hope to explore whether metabolic changes affect the occurrence and development of kidney cancer by looking for evidence of changes on expression at the genomic and protein levels in glucose metabolism and lipid metabolism in ccRCC. We begin with the representative phenomenon of abnormal cancer metabolism: the Warburg effect, through the collection of popular metabolic pathways and related genes in the last decade, as well as some research hotspots, including the role of ferroptosis and glutamine in cancer, systematically elaborated the factors affecting the incidence and metastasis of kidney cancer. This review also identifies the similarities and differences between kidney cancer and other cancers in order to lay a theoretical foundation and provide a valid hypothesis for future research.
Keywords: Warburg effect; cholesterol; clear cell renal cell carcinoma; glucose metabolism; lipid metabolism.
Copyright © 2021 Qi, Li, Che, Wang and Wu.