- Title
- Differential kynurenine pathway metabolism in highly metastatic aggressive breast cancer subtypes: beyond IDO1-induced immunosuppression
- Creator
- Heng, Benjamin; Bilgin, Ayse A.; Guillemin, Gilles J.; Lovejoy, David B.; Tan, Vanessa X.; Milioli, Heloisa H.; Gluch, Laurence; Bustamante, Sonia; Sabaretnam, Tharani; Moscato, Pablo; Lim, Chai K.
- Relation
- Breast Cancer Research Vol. 22, no. 113
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13058-020-01351-1
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Background: Immunotherapy has recently been proposed as a promising treatment to stop breast cancer (BrCa) progression and metastasis. However, there has been limited success in the treatment of BrCa with immune checkpoint inhibitors. This implies that BrCa tumors have other mechanisms to escape immune surveillance. While the kynurenine pathway (KP) is known to be a key player mediating tumor immune evasion and while there are several studies on the roles of the KP in cancer, little is known about KP involvement in BrCa. Methods: To understand how KP is regulated in BrCa, we examined the KP profile in BrCa cell lines and clinical samples (n = 1997) that represent major subtypes of BrCa (luminal, HER2-enriched, and triple-negative (TN)). We carried out qPCR, western blot/immunohistochemistry, and ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography on these samples to quantify the KP enzyme gene, protein, and activity, respectively. Results: We revealed that the KP is highly dysregulated in the HER2-enriched and TN BrCa subtype. Gene, protein expression, and KP metabolomic profiling have shown that the downstream KP enzymes KMO and KYNU are highly upregulated in the HER2-enriched and TN BrCa subtypes, leading to increased production of the potent immunosuppressive metabolites anthranilic acid (AA) and 3-hydroxylanthranilic acid (3HAA). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that KMO and KYNU inhibitors may represent new promising therapeutic targets for BrCa. We also showed that KP metabolite profiling can be used as an accurate biomarker for BrCa subtyping, as we successfully discriminated TN BrCa from other BrCa subtypes.
- Subject
- kynurenine pathway; breast cancer; biomarker; immune evasion; tryptophan
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1429530
- Identifier
- uon:38724
- Identifier
- ISSN:1465-542X
- Rights
- © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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