Cervical cancer patients that respond to chemoradiation therapy display an intense tumor infiltrating immune profile before treatment
EXPERIMENTAL AND MOLECULAR PATHOLOGY
Authors: Martins, Patricia Rocha; Toledo Machado, Christina Monerat; Coxir, Sarah Abreu; de Oliveira, Adriana Jacauna; Moreira, Thayse Batista; Campos, Larissa Soares; Alcantara, Romildo; Calil de Paula, Salua Oliveira; de Oliveira Salles, Paulo Guilherme; Gollob, Kenneth J.; Santos Magalhaes, Wagner Carlos
Abstract
Cervical cancer (CC) is a major cause of death and suffering to women globally with 570,000 new cases in 2017. It disproportionately affects those living in resource-constrained countries such as Brazil, with 90% of the deaths from CC happening in low and middle-income countries. Early detection is still the best strategy for improving response to therapy and survival and cases detected in advanced stages show variable response rates to the standard chemoradiation therapy protocols. Both the genetic landscape and the immune status of patients can dramatically affect cancer progression and response to therapy, as well as disease recurrence. Here we performed a comprehensive sequencing analysis using the cancer gene panel - Ion AmpliSeq (TM) Cancer hotspot Panel V2 CHPv2, as well as determined the immune infiltrate composition of a group of locally advanced CC patients with the goal of identifying genetic and immune characteristics associated with a clinical response to therapy. The expression levels of CD68(+) tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) and CD8(+) tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), as well as the immune checkpoint molecules PD-1, PD-L1 and PD-L2 in stroma and in tumor regions were analyzed by immunohistochemistry (IHC). The HPV infection status with high-risk strains was also determined. Twenty-one samples from patients with squamous cell carcinoma segregated into responder (11) and non-responder (10) groups according to standard chemoradiation therapy response were studied. Our findings indicate that responder patients showed an increase of an inflammatory tumor microenvironment as indicated by higher numbers of CD8(+) and PD-L2(+) TILs, as well as higher expression of PD-L1 immunoreactive area, as compared to the non-responder group. Additionally, our results demonstrate a correlation between the number of gene mutations and PD-L2(+) TILs in the responder group. The genes PIK3CA and KDR/VEGFR were the most mutated genes, corroborating past findings. Together, these findings indicate an inflammatory tumor microenvironment present in patients that will respond to future chemoradiation treatment as compared to those that will not. This points to possible future predictors of response to therapy in CC patients.
Selected by gene co-expression network and molecular docking analyses, ENMD-2076 is highly effective in glioblastoma-bearing rats
AGING-US
Authors: Zhong, Sheng; Bai, Yang; Wu, Bo; Ge, Junliang; Jiang, Shanshan; Li, Weihang; Wang, Xinhui; Ren, Junan; Xu, Haiyang; Chen, Yong; Zhao, Gang
Abstract
Background: Glioblastoma is the most common type of malignant brain tumor. Bioinformatics technology and structure biology were effectively and systematically used to identify specific targets in malignant tumors and screen potential drugs. Results: GBM patients have higher AURKA and KDR mRNA expression compared with normal samples. Then, we identified a small molecular compound, ENMD-2076, could effectively inhibit Aurora kinase A and VEGFR-2 (encoded by KDR) activities. ENMD-2076 is predicted without toxic properties and also has absorption and gratifying brain/blood barrier penetration ability. Further results demonstrated that ENMD-2076 could significantly inhibit GBM cell lines proliferation and vitality, it also suppressed GBM cells migration and invasion. ENMD-2076 induced glioblastoma cell cycle arrest in G2-M phase and apoptosis by inhibiting PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathways. Additionally, ENMD-2076 prolonged the median survival time of tumor-bearing rats and restrained growth rate of tumor volume in vivo. Conclusions: Our findings reveal that ENMD-2076 is a promising drug in dealing with glioblastoma and have a perspective application. Methods: We show that AURKA and KDR genes are hub driver genes in glioblastoma with bioinformatics technology including WGCNA analysis, PPI network, GO, KEGG analysis and GSEA analysis. After identifying a compound via virtual screening analysis, further experiments were carried out to examine the antiglioblastoma activities of the compound in vivo and in vitro.