ABSTRACT
Glucose plays a central role in biology. Almost every organism,
from bacteria to humans, use it as an energy and biomass
source to sustain their metabolic demands. In the human body,
a single glucose molecule can provide up to 36 ATP molecules
via complete aerobic respiration, but it can also be transformed
into several carbon scaffolds for biosynthetic reactions [3, 10,
16]. Cancer cells avidly consume glucose at rates of up to 20
times faster than their healthy counterparts. The elevated glucose
uptake enables the cells to meet the energetic requirements for fast
cell proliferation and to produce many intermediate biosynthetic
precursors involved in biomass duplication [8, 9]. Upregulated
glycolysis is arguably the single most common feature in nearly
all primary and metastatic cancers, a phenomenon known as the
Warburg effect. Even under well-oxygenated conditions, cancer cells
generallymetabolize glucose to produce lactate by aerobic glycolysis
followed by reaction with lactate dehydrogenase. The aberrant
consumption of glucose by tumors has been widely exploited in
the diagnosis of cancer with the use of fluorodeoxyglucose positron
emission tomography (18FDG-PET) in nuclear medicine. Similarly,
using glucose chemical exchange saturation transfer (glucoCEST)
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), tumors are studied by looking
at the concentration of natural glucose in the tissue, which can be
detected through the chemical exchange of hydroxyl groups. This
chapter explains the principles and rationale behind the glucoCEST
technique and presents a summary of themost recent developments
in the field.
