ABSTRACT
This chapter on mathematical modeling and energy metabolism in cancer systems biology will pursue two major objectives. First, the importance of energy, energy signaling, and energy metabolism in cancer will be emphasized, because a major phenotype characteristic of cancer tumors is the loss of a very important systems property in energy metabolism. The second objective of this chapter is to show how the mathematical modeling of biological processes is relevant for cancer systems biology. Here, the emphasis on processes is extremely important. In engineering terms, a process is the sum of operations by which an input (energy, material, or information) is transformed into an output with specific properties. The concept of process is also well established in biology. For example, we could define glycolysis as the process by which glucose (GLC) is converted to pyruvate (PYR) with the regeneration of two molecules of ATP and two NADH. As will be seen, the deregulation of this process is very important in cancer and its mathematical modeling will yield significant insights on the disease development and potential therapeutic targets.
