Glucose starvation as cancer treatment: Thermodynamic point of view

Abstract

To evaluate the effect of glucose deprivation on the robustness of cancer glycolysis, the total entropy production rate was calculated from the in silico modeling of the glycolytic network of HeLa cells grown under different glucose and oxygen conditions. It was shown that glucose deprivation had a deleterious effect for the cells grown under hypoglycemia and hypoxia and that the intracellular acidification therapy and the glucose deprivation treatment had synergic effects on the decrease of cancer glycolysis robustness.