Abstract

Lipid signaling pathways regulate a plethora of cell processes including proliferation, growth survival and migration; they also control acute responses such as contraction and metabolism. Significant work has demonstrated that lipid signaling pathways play a key role in cancer though this has focused primarily upon PI3kinase signaling. We have adopted two distinct approaches to determining the importance in other lipid signaling pathways in malignancy. Firstly in this presentation the evidence for phospholipase D and lysophospholipase D (autotaxin) in regulating cell growth and proliferation will be presented emphasizing the roles of the two lipid products phosphatidic acid and lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) and their cross talk with sphingolipid signallinf (ceramide and S1P ) in Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Runx-induced transformation and NPC . Secondly the development of non-biased lipidomic analysis of colorectal cancer by mass spectrometry is pointing to the importance of unsuspected lipid signaling pathways in cancer.