Lactate can act as a signaling molecule, overexpressing key oncogenes, transcription factors, and cell cycle/proliferation genes in cancer cells.

“So what we saw then is like this lactate alone was enough to trigger the expression of all the major oncogenes, transcription factors, and even depress the cell arrest genes.”

“In 10 and 20, we didn't see much of a difference. but we saw more than in zero. What struck us, and that's kind of hopefully we can show, is that if you cultivate the cancer cells in glucose alone, I give this presentation on Anderson, but so we looked at the cancer cells and we looked at the major oncogenic, I mean, oncogenes, transcription factors, and cycle genes. We had no glucose incubation, no glutamine either. just glucose. And then we added lactate, 10 millimolars and 20 millimolars. So we did RNA extraction and we looked at in the cancer cells where they're without any media, that is no glucose, no glutamine, we didn't see RNA expression.”

“But what we wanted to see is like could lactate also be a signaling molecule And that's where we observe is like looking at transcriptional activity, looking at the RNA expressions of the key oncogenes, transcription factors, and cell cycle genes and proliferation genes in cancer. Lactate overexpressed them between two and eight fold compared to control.”

“The glucose media is the same. We just added more lactate. and we see a much amplified response. How much is it amplified with? So it was, for example, this is the no lactate versus the lactate. We can see... That looks like about 2X? Yeah, sometimes even 2X.”

“So is there an experiment that could be done where you constantly change the media. You have a flux of media that allows them to have a finite amount of glucose, but you constantly strip away the lactate to see what the true baseline level of expression is, absent the lactate as the signal.”