Arbidol inhibits human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma growth in vitro and in vivo through suppressing ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related protein kinase
Abstract
Human esophageal cancer has a global impact on human health due to its high incidence and mortality. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new drugs to treat or prevent the prominent pathological subtype of esophageal cancer, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Based upon a screening of drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, we discovered that Arbidol could effectively inhibit the proliferation of human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in vitro. Next, we conducted a series of cell-based assays and found that Arbidol treatment inhibited the proliferation and colony formation ability of ESCC cells and promoted G1 phase cell cycle arrest. Phospho-proteomics experiments, in vitro kinase assays and pull-down assays were subsequently performed in order to identify the underlying growth inhibitory mechanism. We verified Arbidol is a potential ATR inhibitor via binding to ATR kinase to reduce the phosphorylation and activation of MCM2 at Ser108. Finally, we demonstrated Arbidol had the inhibitory effect of ESCC in vivo by a PDX model. All together, Arbidol inhibits the proliferation of ESCC in vitro and in vivo through the DNA replication pathway and is associated with the cell cycle.
Data availability
The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium (http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org) via the iProX partner repository with the dataset identifier PXD034944.
-
Proteomics analysis report of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma treated by ArbidolProteomeXchange Consortium, PXD034944.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (81872335)
- Kangdong Liu
National Natural Science Youth Foundatio of China (81902486)
- Yanan Jiang
Natural Science Foundation of Henan (161100510300)
- Kangdong Liu
The Central Plains Science and Technology Innovation Leading Talents (224200510015)
- Kangdong Liu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Compliance with Ethics RequirementsIn this study, we established an ESCC PDX model. In this model, the tumor sample from an ESCC patient was EG20 (ESCC, male, T2N0M0II, moderately differentiated, obtained from Linzhou Cancer Hospital, Henan Province, China). The patient was fully informed of the study and provided consent. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Zhengzhou University (ZZUHCI-2019012).
Copyright
© 2022, Yang 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.
Metrics
-
- 607
- views
-
- 165
- downloads
-
- 1
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Cancer Biology
- Physics of Living Systems
The tumor stroma consists mainly of extracellular matrix, fibroblasts, immune cells, and vasculature. Its structure and functions are altered during malignancy: tumor cells transform fibroblasts into cancer-associated fibroblasts, which exhibit immunosuppressive activities on which growth and metastasis depend. These include exclusion of immune cells from the tumor nest, cancer progression, and inhibition of T-cell-based immunotherapy. To understand these complex interactions, we measure the density of different cell types in the stroma using immunohistochemistry techniques on tumor samples from lung cancer patients. We incorporate these data into a minimal dynamical system, explore the variety of outcomes, and finally establish a spatio-temporal model that explains the cell distribution. We reproduce that cancer-associated fibroblasts act as a barrier to tumor expansion, but also reduce the efficiency of the immune response. Our conclusion is that the final outcome depends on the parameter values for each patient and leads to either tumor invasion, persistence, or eradication as a result of the interplay between cancer cell growth, T-cell cytotoxicity, and fibroblast activity. However, despite the existence of a wide range of scenarios, distinct trajectories, and patterns allow quantitative predictions that may help in the selection of new therapies and personalized protocols.
-
- Cancer Biology
- Cell Biology
The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is an essential sensing organelle responsible for the folding and secretion of almost one-third of eukaryotic cells' total proteins. However, environmental, chemical, and genetic insults often lead to protein misfolding in the ER, accumulating misfolded proteins, and causing ER stress. To solve this, several mechanisms were reported to relieve ER stress by decreasing the ER protein load. Recently, we reported a novel ER surveillance mechanism by which proteins from the secretory pathway are refluxed to the cytosol to relieve the ER of its content. The refluxed proteins gain new prosurvival functions in cancer cells, thereby increasing cancer cell fitness. We termed this phenomenon ER to CYtosol Signaling (or ‘ERCYS’). Here, we found that in mammalian cells, ERCYS is regulated by DNAJB12, DNAJB14, and the HSC70 cochaperone SGTA. Mechanistically, DNAJB12 and DNAJB14 bind HSC70 and SGTA - through their cytosolically localized J-domains to facilitate ER-protein reflux. DNAJB12 is necessary and sufficient to drive this phenomenon to increase AGR2 reflux and inhibit wt-p53 during ER stress. Mutations in DNAJB12/14 J-domain prevent the inhibitory interaction between AGR2-wt-p53. Thus, targeting the DNAJB12/14-HSC70/SGTA axis is a promising strategy to inhibit ERCYS and impair cancer cell fitness.