bims-tumime Biomed News
on Tumor microenvironment and metabolism
Issue of 2023–12–17
eleven papers selected by
Alex Muir, University of Chicago
  1. Supraphysiological glutamine as a means of depleting intracellular amino acids to enhance pancreatic cancer chemosensitivity.
  2. Metabolic challengers selecting tumor-persistent cells.
  3. CD8+ T Cells Keep Their (K+)urrency for Function.
  4. Mitochondria transfer by platelet-derived microparticles regulates breast cancer bioenergetic states and malignant features.
  5. Re-"Formate" T-cell Antitumor Responses.
  6. Treatment with the PPARα agonist fenofibrate improves the efficacy of CD8+ T cell therapy for melanoma.
  7. AMP-activated protein kinase is necessary for Treg cell functional adaptation to microenvironmental stress.
  8. Spatial metabolic patterns.
  9. Single-cell spatial metabolomics with cell-type specific protein profiling for tissue systems biology.
  10. Cancer CD39 drives metabolic adaption and mal-differentiation of CD4+ T cells in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.
  11. Adipocyte Microenvironment in Ovarian Cancer: A Critical Contributor?
  1. Res Sq. 2023 Nov 30. pii: rs.3.rs-3647514. [Epub ahead of print]
    Supraphysiological glutamine as a means of depleting intracellular amino acids to enhance pancreatic cancer chemosensitivity.
    Neil Bhowmick, Hayato Muranaka, Sandrine Billet, Carlos Cruz-Hernández, Johanna Ten Hoeve, Gabrielle Gonzales, Omer Elmadbouh, Le Zhang, Bethany Smith, Mourad Tighiouart, Sungyong You, Mouad Edderkaoui, Andrew Hendifar, Stephen Pandol, Jun Gong.
      Limited efficacy of systemic therapy for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients contributes to high mortality. Cancer cells develop strategies to secure nutrients in nutrient-deprived conditions and chemotherapy treatment. Despite the dependency of PDAC on glutamine (Gln) for growth and survival, strategies designed to suppress Gln metabolism have limited effects. Here, we demonstrated that supraphysiological concentrations of glutamine (SPG) could produce paradoxical responses leading to tumor growth inhibition alone and in combination with chemotherapy. Integrated metabolic and transcriptomic analysis revealed that the growth inhibitory effect of SPG was the result of a decrease in intracellular amino acid and nucleotide pools. Mechanistically, disruption of the sodium gradient, plasma membrane depolarization, and competitive inhibition of amino acid transport mediated amino acid deprivation. Among standard chemotherapies given to PDAC patients, gemcitabine treatment resulted in a significant enrichment of amino acid and nucleoside pools, exposing a metabolic vulnerability to SPG-induced metabolic alterations. Further analysis highlighted a superior anticancer effect of D-glutamine, a non-metabolizable enantiomer of the L-glutamine, by suppressing both amino acid uptake and glutaminolysis, in gemcitabine-treated preclinical models with no apparent toxicity. Our study suggests supraphysiological glutamine could be a means of inhibiting amino acid uptake and nucleotide biosynthesis, potentiating gemcitabine sensitivity in PDAC.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3647514/v1
  2. Trends Endocrinol Metab. 2023 Dec 09. pii: S1043-2760(23)00244-8. [Epub ahead of print]
    Metabolic challengers selecting tumor-persistent cells.
    Caterina Mancini, Giulia Lori, Erica Pranzini, Maria Letizia Taddei.
      Resistance to anticancer therapy still represents one of the main obstacles to cancer treatment. Numerous components of the tumor microenvironment (TME) contribute significantly to the acquisition of drug resistance. Microenvironmental pressures arising during cancer evolution foster tumor heterogeneity (TH) and facilitate the emergence of drug-resistant clones. In particular, metabolic pressures arising in the TME may favor epigenetic adaptations supporting the acquisition of persistence features in tumor cells. Tumor-persistent cells (TPCs) are characterized by high phenotypic and metabolic plasticity, representing a noticeable advantage in chemo- and radio-resistance. Understanding the crosslink between the evolution of metabolic pressures in the TME, epigenetics, and TPC evolution is significant for developing novel therapeutic strategies specifically targeting TPC vulnerabilities to overcome drug resistance.
    Keywords:  epigenetics; metabolism; therapy resistance; tumor microenvironment; tumor-persistent cells
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tem.2023.11.005
  3. Cancer Immunol Res. 2023 Dec 08. OF1
    CD8+ T Cells Keep Their (K+)urrency for Function.
    Alma Banuelos, Henrique Borges da Silva.
      CD8+ T-cell responses are influenced by ion abundance, which can widely vary within the tumor microenvironment. In this issue, Collier and colleagues investigated how intracellular versus extracellular potassium ion (K+) regulates intratumoral CD8+ T cells. They show that, while excessive extracellular K+ induces exhaustion, intracellular K+ is needed for protection from dysfunction. This work shows additional evidence that the regulation of CD8+ T-cell responses depends on a fine balance between intracellular and extracellular metabolite levels. See related article by Collier et al. (2) .
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-23-0961
  4. Mol Cancer Res. 2023 Dec 12.
    Mitochondria transfer by platelet-derived microparticles regulates breast cancer bioenergetic states and malignant features.
    Vanessa Veilleux, Nicolas Pichaud, Luc H Boudreau, Gilles A Robichaud.
      An increasing number of studies show that platelets as well as platelet-derived microparticles (PMPs) play significant roles in cancer malignancy and disease progression. Particularly, PMPs have the capacity to interact and internalize within target cells resulting in the transfer of their bioactive cargo, which can modulate the signaling and activation processes of recipient cells. We recently identified a new subpopulation of these vesicles (termed mitoMPs), which contain functional mitochondria. Given the predominant role of mitochondria in cancer cell metabolism and disease progression, we set out to investigate the impact of mitoMPs on breast cancer metabolic reprograming and phenotypic processes leading to malignancy. Interestingly, we observed that recipient cell permeability to PMP internalization varied among the breast cancer cell types evaluated in our study. Specifically, cells permissive to mitoMPs acquire mitochondrial-dependent functions, which stimulate increased cellular oxygen consumption rates and intracellular ATP production. In addition, cancer cells co-incubated with PMPs display enhanced malignant features in terms of migration and invasion. Most importantly, the cancer aggressive processes and notable metabolic plasticity induced by PMPs were highly dependent on the functional status of the mitoMP-packaged mitochondria. These findings characterize a new mechanism by which breast cancer cells acquire foreign mitochondria resulting in the gain of metabolic processes and malignant features. A better understanding of these mechanisms may provide therapeutic opportunities through PMP blockade to deprive cancer cells from resources vital in disease progression. Implications: We show that the transfer of foreign mitochondria by microparticles modulates recipient cancer cell metabolic plasticity, leading to greater malignant processes.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-23-0329
  5. Cancer Discov. 2023 Dec 12. 13(12): 2507-2509
    Re-"Formate" T-cell Antitumor Responses.
    Mei-Chun Lin, Sofie Hedlund Moller, Ping-Chih Ho.
       SUMMARY: Rowe and colleagues discover that one-carbon (1C) metabolism rewiring occurs upon T-cell activation to support proliferation and cytolytic activity in CD8+ T cells and that supplementation of 1C donor formate rescues the dysfunctional T cells and their responsiveness to anti-PD-1 in selective tumor-infiltrated T-cell subsets. This finding represents an attractive strategy to overcome a metabolic vulnerability in the tumor microenvironment and improve the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade. See related article by Rowe et al., p. 2566 (8).
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-23-1059
  6. Mol Ther Oncolytics. 2023 Dec 19. 31 100744
    Treatment with the PPARα agonist fenofibrate improves the efficacy of CD8+ T cell therapy for melanoma.
    Mohadeseh Hasanpourghadi, Arezki Chekaoui, Sophia Kurian, Raj Kurupati, Robert Ambrose, Wynetta Giles-Davis, Amara Saha, Xu Xiaowei, Hildegund C J Ertl.
      Adoptive transfer of tumor antigen-specific CD8+ T cells can limit tumor progression but is hampered by the T cells' rapid functional impairment within the tumor microenvironment (TME). This is in part caused by metabolic stress due to lack of oxygen and glucose. Here, we report that fenofibrate treatment of human ex vivo expanded tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) improves their ability to limit melanoma progression in a patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse model. TILs treated with fenofibrate, a peroxisome proliferator receptor alpha (PPARα) agonist, switch from glycolysis to fatty acid oxidation (FAO) and increase the ability to slow the progression of autologous melanomas in mice with freshly transplanted human tumor fragments or injected with tumor cell lines established from the patients' melanomas and ex vivo expanded TILs.
    Keywords:  PDX mouse model; PPARα agonist treatment; T cell metabolism; melanoma; tumor antigen-specific T cells
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omto.2023.100744
  7. bioRxiv. 2023 Dec 01. pii: 2023.11.29.568904. [Epub ahead of print]
    AMP-activated protein kinase is necessary for Treg cell functional adaptation to microenvironmental stress.
    Manuel A Torres Acosta, Nurbek Mambetsariev, Carla P Reyes Flores, Kathryn A Helmin, Qianli Liu, Anthony M Joudi, Luisa Morales-Nebreda, Jonathan Gurkan, Kathleen Cheng, Hiam Abdala-Valencia, Samuel E Weinberg, Benjamin D Singer.
      CD4+FOXP3+ regulatory T (Treg) cells maintain self-tolerance, suppress the immune response to cancer, and protect against tissue injury in the lung and other organs. Treg cells require mitochondrial metabolism to exert their function, but how Treg cells adapt their metabolic programs to sustain and optimize their function during an immune response occurring in a metabolically stressed microenvironment remains unclear. Here, we tested whether Treg cells require the energy homeostasis-maintaining enzyme AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) to adapt to metabolically aberrant microenvironments caused by malignancy or lung injury, finding that AMPK is dispensable for Treg cell immune-homeostatic function but is necessary for full Treg cell function in B16 melanoma tumors and during acute lung injury caused by influenza virus pneumonia. AMPK-deficient Treg cells had lower mitochondrial mass and exhibited an impaired ability to maximize aerobic respiration. Mechanistically, we found that AMPK regulates DNA methyltransferase 1 to promote transcriptional programs associated with mitochondrial function in the tumor microenvironment. In the lung during viral pneumonia, we found that AMPK sustains metabolic homeostasis and mitochondrial activity. Induction of DNA hypomethylation was sufficient to rescue mitochondrial mass in AMPK-deficient Treg cells, linking DNA methylation with AMPK function and mitochondrial metabolism. These results define AMPK as a determinant of Treg cell adaptation to metabolic stress and offer potential therapeutic targets in cancer and tissue injury.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.29.568904
  8. Nat Rev Cancer. 2023 Dec 11.
    Spatial metabolic patterns.
    Anna Dart.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-023-00654-7
  9. Nat Commun. 2023 Dec 13. 14(1): 8260
    Single-cell spatial metabolomics with cell-type specific protein profiling for tissue systems biology.
    Thomas Hu, Mayar Allam, Shuangyi Cai, Walter Henderson, Brian Yueh, Aybuke Garipcan, Anton V Ievlev, Maryam Afkarian, Semir Beyaz, Ahmet F Coskun.
      Metabolic reprogramming in cancer and immune cells occurs to support their increasing energy needs in biological tissues. Here we propose Single Cell Spatially resolved Metabolic (scSpaMet) framework for joint protein-metabolite profiling of single immune and cancer cells in male human tissues by incorporating untargeted spatial metabolomics and targeted multiplexed protein imaging in a single pipeline. We utilized the scSpaMet to profile cell types and spatial metabolomic maps of 19507, 31156, and 8215 single cells in human lung cancer, tonsil, and endometrium tissues, respectively. The scSpaMet analysis revealed cell type-dependent metabolite profiles and local metabolite competition of neighboring single cells in human tissues. Deep learning-based joint embedding revealed unique metabolite states within cell types. Trajectory inference showed metabolic patterns along cell differentiation paths. Here we show scSpaMet's ability to quantify and visualize the cell-type specific and spatially resolved metabolic-protein mapping as an emerging tool for systems-level understanding of tissue biology.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43917-5
  10. Cell Death Dis. 2023 Dec 08. 14(12): 804
    Cancer CD39 drives metabolic adaption and mal-differentiation of CD4+ T cells in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.
    Ying Wang, Mengdi Liu, Lei Zhang, Xiyu Liu, Huiyan Ji, Yan Wang, Jun Gui, Yan Yue, Zhenke Wen.
      While ectonucleotidase CD39 is a cancer therapeutic target in clinical trials, its direct effect on T-cell differentiation in human non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) remains unclear. Herein, we demonstrate that human NSCLC cells, including tumor cell lines and primary tumor cells from clinical patients, efficiently drive the metabolic adaption of human CD4+ T cells, instructing differentiation of regulatory T cells while inhibiting effector T cells. Of importance, NSCLC-induced T-cell mal-differentiation primarily depends on cancer CD39, as this can be fundamentally blocked by genetic depletion of CD39 in NSCLC. Mechanistically, NSCLC cells package CD39 into their exosomes and transfer such CD39-containing exosomes into interacting T cells, resulting in ATP insufficiency and AMPK hyperactivation. Such CD39-dependent NSCLC-T cell interaction holds well in patients-derived primary tumor cells and patient-derived organoids (PDOs). Accordingly, genetic depletion of CD39 alone or in combination with the anti-PD-1 immunotherapy efficiently rescues effector T cell differentiation, instigates anti-tumor T cell immunity, and inhibits tumor growth of PDOs. Together, targeting cancer CD39 can correct the mal-differentiation of CD4+ T cells in human NSCLC, providing in-depth insight into therapeutic CD39 inhibitors.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41419-023-06336-4
  11. Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Nov 22. pii: 16589. [Epub ahead of print]24(23):
    Adipocyte Microenvironment in Ovarian Cancer: A Critical Contributor?
    Ana Duarte Mendes, Ana Rita Freitas, Rodrigo Vicente, Marina Vitorino, Marta Vaz Batista, Michelle Silva, Sofia Braga.
      Ovarian cancer is one of the most common gynecological malignancies and has low survival rates. One of the main determinants of this unfavorable prognosis is the high rate of peritoneal metastasis at diagnosis, closely related to its morbidity and mortality. The mechanism underlying peritoneal carcinomatosis is not clearly defined, but a clear preference for omental spread has been described. Growing evidence suggests that adipose tissue plays a role in promoting cancer onset and progression. Moreover, obesity can lead to changes in the original functions of adipocytes, resulting in metabolic and inflammatory changes in the adipose tissue microenvironment, potentially increasing the risk of tumor growth. However, the specific roles of adipocytes in ovarian cancer have not yet been fully elucidated. Due to the undeniable link between obesity and cancer, the adipose tissue microenvironment could also present a promising therapeutic target that warrants further research. This review discusses the complex relationship between ovarian cancer and the adipose tissue microenvironment.
    Keywords:  adipocyte; ovarian cancer; pathogenesis; peritoneal metastasis; tumor microenvironment
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms242316589
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