Christian M. Metallo

Christian Metallo is a bioengineering and cancer metabolism researcher who discovered that cancer cells under hypoxia use glutamine through reductive carboxylation to generate citrate for lipid synthesis, a reversal of the canonical TCA cycle direction. This finding revealed how tumors adapt their metabolic programs to hostile microenvironments and generate the lipids necessary for proliferation even when oxidative metabolism is impaired. Metallo develops quantitative metabolic flux analysis approaches to measure pathway activity in living cells and applies these to understand cancer metabolic adaptation and drug resistance mechanisms.