Breast Cancer Cell Subtypes Display Different Metabolic Phenotypes That Correlate with Their Clinical Classification

Metabolic reprogramming of cancer cells represents an orchestrated network of evolving molecular and functional adaptations during oncogenic progression. In particular, how metabolic reprogramming is orchestrated in breast cancer and its decisive role in the oncogenic process and tumor evolving adaptations are well consolidated at the molecular level. Nevertheless, potential correlations between functional metabolic features and breast cancer clinical classification still represent issues that have not been fully studied to date. Accordingly, we aimed to investigate whether breast cancer cell models representative of each clinical subtype might display different metabolic phenotypes that correlate with current clinical classifications. In the present work, functional metabolic profiling was performed for breast cancer cell models representative of each clinical subtype based on the combination of enzyme inhibitors for key metabolic pathways, and isotope-labeled tracing dynamic analysis. The results indicated the main metabolic phenotypes, so-called ‘metabophenotypes’, in terms of their dependency on glycolytic metabolism or their reliance on mitochondrial oxidative metabolism. The results showed that breast cancer cell subtypes display different metabophenotypes. Importantly, these metabophenotypes are clearly correlated with the current clinical classifications.