A chemical screen based on an interruption of zebrafish gastrulation identifies the HTR2C inhibitor Pizotifen as a suppressor of EMT-mediated metastasis
- National University of Singapore, Singapore
- National Cancer Center, Japan
Abstract
Metastasis is responsible for approximately 90% of cancer-associated mortality but few models exist that allow for rapid and effective screening of anti-metastasis drugs. Current mouse models of metastasis are too expensive and time consuming to use for rapid and high-throughput screening. Therefore, we created a unique screening concept utilizing conserved mechanisms between zebrafish gastrulation and cancer metastasis for identification of potential anti-metastatic drugs. We hypothesized that small chemicals that interrupt zebrafish gastrulation might also suppress metastatic progression of cancer cells and developed a phenotype-based chemical screen to test the hypothesis. The screen used epiboly, the first morphogenetic movement in gastrulation, as a marker and enabled 100 chemicals to be tested in five hours. The screen tested 1280 FDA-approved drugs and identified Pizotifen, an antagonist for serotonin receptor 2C (HTR2C) as an epiboly-interrupting drug. Pharmacologic and genetic inhibition of HTR2C suppressed metastatic progression in a mouse model. Blocking HTR2C with Pizotifen restored epithelial properties to metastatic cells through inhibition of Wnt-signaling. In contrast, HTR2C induced epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) through activation of Wnt-signaling and promoted metastatic dissemination of human cancer cells in a zebrafish xenotransplantation model. Taken together, our concept offers a novel platform for discovery of anti-metastasis drugs.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Medical Research Council (R-154000547511)
- Zhiyuan Gong
Ministry of Education - Singapore (R-154000A23112)
- Zhiyuan Gong
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: The study protocol using zebrafish was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the National University of Singapore (protocol number: R16-1068). The study protocol using mice (protocol number: BRC IACUC #110612) was approved by A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore).
Copyright
© 2021, Nakayama et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A chemical screen based on an interruption of zebrafish gastrulation identifies the HTR2C inhibitor Pizotifen as a suppressor of EMT-mediated metastasis
eLife 10:e70151.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70151
Further reading
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- Developmental Biology
The evolutionarily conserved Hippo (Hpo) pathway has been shown to impact early development and tumorigenesis by governing cell proliferation and apoptosis. However, its post-developmental roles are relatively unexplored. Here, we demonstrate its roles in post-mitotic cells by showing that defective Hpo signaling accelerates age-associated structural and functional decline of neurons in Caenorhabditis elegans. Loss of wts-1/LATS, the core kinase of the Hpo pathway, resulted in premature deformation of touch neurons and impaired touch responses in a yap-1/YAP-dependent manner, the downstream transcriptional co-activator of LATS. Decreased movement as well as microtubule destabilization by treatment with colchicine or disruption of microtubule-stabilizing genes alleviated the neuronal deformation of wts-1 mutants. Colchicine exerted neuroprotective effects even during normal aging. In addition, the deficiency of a microtubule-severing enzyme spas-1 also led to precocious structural deformation. These results consistently suggest that hyper-stabilized microtubules in both wts-1-deficient neurons and normally aged neurons are detrimental to the maintenance of neuronal structural integrity. In summary, Hpo pathway governs the structural and functional maintenance of differentiated neurons by modulating microtubule stability, raising the possibility that the microtubule stability of fully developed neurons could be a promising target to delay neuronal aging. Our study provides potential therapeutic approaches to combat age- or disease-related neurodegeneration.
