Pituitary adenomas are common, benign brain tumors. Some tumors show aggressive phenotypes including early recurrence, local invasion and distant metastasis, but the underlying mechanism to drive the progression of pituitary tumors has remained to be clarified. Aerobic glycolysis known as the Warburg effect is one of the emerging hallmarks of cancer, which has an impact on the tumor biology partly through epigenetic regulation of the tumor-promoting genes. Here, we demonstrate metabolic reprogramming in pituitary tumors contributes to tumor cell growth with epigenetic changes such as histone acetylation. Notably, a shift in histone acetylation increases the expression of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) oncogene, which drives metabolism-dependent cell proliferation in pituitary tumors. These indicate that epigenetic changes could be the specific biomarker for predicting the behavior of pituitary tumors and exploitable as a novel target for the aggressive types of the pituitary tumors.

垂体腺瘤是常见的良性脑肿瘤。一些肿瘤表现出侵袭性表型，包括早期复发、局部侵袭和远处转移，但驱动垂体肿瘤进展的潜在机制仍有待阐明。被称为 Warburg 效应的有氧糖酵解是癌症的新兴标志之一，部分通过促癌基因的表观遗传调控对肿瘤生物学产生影响。在这里，我们证明了垂体肿瘤中的代谢重编程通过表观遗传变化（如组蛋白乙酰化）促进了肿瘤细胞的生长。值得注意的是，组蛋白乙酰化的转变增加了端粒酶逆转录酶 (TERT) 致癌基因的表达，这驱动了垂体肿瘤中依赖代谢的细胞增殖。