Targeted therapy offers an opportunity for personalized medicine that's specific for a patient's tumor, but the hyper-focused treatment creates possibilities for cells to mutate and become resistant to the therapy.

Despite the arrival of FDA-approved tissue-agnostic targeted cancer therapies, there is increasing recognition that the response of tumors that are driven by the same oncogene differs according to their location.

The Warburg effect – the marked preference of tumors for fueling themselves via anaerobic metabolism – was described more than 90 years ago. Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1931, and research into the phenomenon long dominated the field of tumor metabolism. Over the past decade, however, there has been increased attention to the fact that tumor metabolism is deregulated in multiple ways beyond the Warburg effect.