Many oncogenes are known to modulate metabolic pathways, particularly those involving glucose and glutamine, to promote anaplerosis and tumour cell survival. But, do different oncogenes regulate the same metabolic pathways in the same types of cancer? Yuneva and colleagues found different alterations to glucose and glutamine metabolic pathways in liver tumours in mice depending on whether they were induced by MYC or MET. Moreover, MYC-induced lung tumours in mice had different glucose and glutamine metabolic profiles from MYC-induced liver tumours. Therefore, targeting metabolic pathways for cancer therapy should be preceded by metabolic profiling to account for the apparent context specificity of alterations to metabolism in tumour cells.