Faculty Opinions recommendation of Cancer cells display profound intra- and interline variation following prolonged exposure to antimitotic drugs.

Author(s):  
Claire Walczak
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana C. Henriques ◽  
Patrícia M. A. Silva ◽  
Bruno Sarmento ◽  
Hassan Bousbaa

AbstractAntimitotic drugs arrest cells in mitosis through chronic activation of the spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC), leading to cell death. However, drug-treated cancer cells can escape death by undergoing mitotic slippage, due to premature mitotic exit. Therefore, overcoming slippage issue is a promising chemotherapeutic strategy to improve the effectiveness of antimitotics. Here, we antagonized SAC silencing by knocking down the MAD2-binding protein p31comet, to delay mitotic slippage, and tracked cancer cells treated with the antimitotic drug paclitaxel, over 3 days live-cell time-lapse analysis. We found that in the absence of p31comet, the duration of mitotic block was increased in cells challenged with nanomolar concentrations of paclitaxel, leading to an additive effects in terms of cell death which was predominantly anticipated during the first mitosis. As accumulation of an apoptotic signal was suggested to prevent mitotic slippage, when we challenged p31comet-depleted mitotic-arrested cells with the apoptosis potentiator Navitoclax (previously called ABT-263), cell fate was shifted to accelerated post-mitotic death. We conclude that inhibition of SAC silencing is critical for enhancing the lethality of antimitotic drugs as well as that of therapeutic apoptosis-inducing small molecules, with distinct mechanisms. The study highlights the potential of p31comet as a target for antimitotic therapies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Ji-In Noh ◽  
Seul-Ki Mun ◽  
Eui Hyeon Lim ◽  
Hangun Kim ◽  
Dong-Jo Chang ◽  
...  

Physconia hokkaidensis methanol extract (PHE) was studied to identify anticancer effects and reveal its mechanism of action by an analysis of cytotoxicity, cell cycles, and apoptosis biomarkers. PHE showed strong cytotoxicity in various cancer cells, including HL-60, HeLa, A549, Hep G2, AGS, MDA-MB-231, and MCF-7. Of these cell lines, the growth of MDA-MB-231 was concentration-dependently suppressed by PHE, but MCF-7 was not affected. MDA-MB-231 cells, triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) cells, do not express estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2), whereas MCF-7 cells are ER-positive, PR-positive, and HER-2-negative breast cancer cells. The number of cells in sub-G1 phase was increased after 24 h of treatment, and annexin V/PI staining showed that the population size of apoptotic cells was increased by prolonged exposure to PHE. Moreover, PHE treatment downregulated the transcriptional levels of Bcl-2, AMPK, and p-Akt, whereas it significantly upregulated the levels of cleaved caspase-3, cleaved caspase-9, and cleaved-PARP. In conclusion, it was confirmed that the PHE exhibited selective cytotoxicity toward MDA-MB-231, not toward MCF-7, and its cytotoxic activity is based on induction of apoptosis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 2132
Author(s):  
Petra M. Wise ◽  
Paolo Neviani ◽  
Stefan Riwaldt ◽  
Thomas Juhl Corydon ◽  
Markus Wehland ◽  
...  

Space travel has always been the man’s ultimate destination. With the ability of spaceflight though, came the realization that exposure to microgravity has lasting effects on the human body. To counteract these, many studies were and are undertaken, on multiple levels. Changes in cell growth, gene, and protein expression have been described in different models on Earth and in space. Extracellular vesicles, and in particular exosomes, are important cell-cell communicators, being secreted from almost all the cells and therefore, are a perfect target to further investigate the underlying reasons of the organism’s adaptations to microgravity. Here, we studied supernatants harvested from the CellBox-1 experiment, which featured human thyroid cancer cells flown to the International Space Station during the SpaceX CRS-3 cargo mission. The initial results show differences in the number of secreted exosomes, as well as in the distribution of subpopulations in regards to their surface protein expression. Notably, alteration of their population regarding the tetraspanin surface expression was observed. This is a promising step into a new area of microgravity research and will potentially lead to the discovery of new biomarkers and pathways of cellular cross-talk.


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Parrondo ◽  
Alicia Pozas ◽  
Teresita Reiner ◽  
Priyamvada Rai ◽  
Carlos Perez-Stable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. Lederman ◽  
Michael R. King

1 AbstractBackgroundMetastasis through the bloodstream contributes to poor prognosis in many types of cancer. A unique approach to target and kill colon, prostate, and other epithelial-type cancer cells in the blood has been recently developed that causes circulating leukocytes to present the cancer-specific, liposome-bound Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF)-related apoptosis inducing ligand (TRAIL) on their surface along with E – selectin adhesion receptors. This approach, demonstrated both in vitro with human blood and in mice, mimics the cytotoxic activity of natural killer cells. The resulting liposomal TRAIL-coated leukocytes hold promise as an effective means to neutralize circulating tumor cells that enter the bloodstream with the potential to form new metastases.ResultsThe computational biology study reported here examines the mechanism of this effective signal delivery, by considering the kinetics of the coupled reaction cascade, from TRAIL binding death receptor to eventual apoptosis. In this study, a collision of bound TRAIL with circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is considered and compared to a prolonged exposure of CTCs to soluble TRAIL. An existing computational model of soluble TRAIL treatment was modified to represent the kinetics from a diffusion-limited 3D reference frame into a 2D collision frame with advection and adhesion to mimic the E – selectin and membrane bound TRAIL treatment. Thus, the current model recreates the new approach of targeting cancer cells within the blood. The model was found to faithfully reproduce representative observations from experiments of liposomal TRAIL treatment under shear. The model predicts apoptosis of CTCs within 2 hr when treated with membrane bound TRAIL, while apoptosis in CTCs treated with soluble TRAIL proceeds much more slowly over the course of 10 hrs, consistent with previous experiments. Given the clearance rate of soluble TRAIL in vivo, this model predicts that the soluble TRAIL method would be rendered ineffective, as found in previous experiments.ConclusionThis study therefore indicates that the kinetics of the coupled reaction cascade of liposomal E – selectin and membrane bound TRAIL colliding with CTCs can explain why this new approach to target and kill cancer cells in blood is much more effective than its soluble counterpart.


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