Antagonism of glycolysis and reductive carboxylation of glutamine potentiates activity of oncolytic adenoviruses in cancer cells

Tumour cells exhibiting the Warburg effect rely on aerobic glycolysis for ATP production and have a notable addiction to anaplerotic use of glutamine for macromolecular synthesis. This strategy maximises cellular biosynthetic potential while avoiding excessive depletion of NAD+, and provides an attractive anabolic environment for viral infection. Here we evaluate infection of highly permissive and poorly permissive cancer cells with wild type adenoviruses and the oncolytic chimeric adenovirus enadenotucirev (EnAd). All adenoviruses caused an increase in glucose and glutamine uptake along with increased lactic acid secretion. Counterintuitively, restricting glycolysis using 2-deoxyglucose (2DG) or by limiting glucose supply strongly improved virus activity in both cell types. Antagonism of glycolysis also boosted EnAd replication and transgene expression within human tumour biopsies and in xenografted tumours in vivo. In contrast, the virus life cycle was critically dependent on exogenous glutamine. Virus activity in glutamine-free cells was rescued with exogenous membrane-permeable α-ketoglutarate, but not pyruvate or oxaloacetate, suggesting an important role for reductive carboxylation in glutamine usage, perhaps for production of biosynthetic intermediates. This overlap between the metabolic phenotypes of adenovirus infection and transformed tumour cells may provide insight into how oncolytic adenoviruses exploit metabolic transformation to augment their selectivity for cancer cells.

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