The relevance of tyrosine kinase inhibitors for global metabolic pathways in cancer

Tumor metabolism is a thrilling discipline that focuses on mechanisms used by cancer cells to earn crucial building blocks and energy to preserve growth and overcome resistance to various treatment modalities. At the same time, therapies directed specifically against aberrant signalling pathways driven by protein tyrosine kinases (TKs) involved in proliferation, metastasis and growth count for several years to promising anti-cancer approaches. In this respect, small molecule inhibitors are the most widely used clinically relevant means for targeted therapy, with a rising number of approvals for TKs inhibitors. In this review, we discuss recent observations related to TKs-associated metabolism and to metabolic feedback that is initialized as cellular response to particular TK-targeted therapies. These observations provide collective evidence that therapeutic responses are primarily linked to such pathways as regulation of lipid and amino acid metabolism, TCA cycle and glycolysis, advocating therefore the development of further effective targeted therapies against a broader spectrum of TKs to treat patients whose tumors display deregulated signalling driven by these proteins.