Abstract 4697: The covalent CDK7 inhibitor THZ1 can counteract apoptotic resistance and suppress the transcription of genes attributed to chronic lymphocytic leukemia malignancy
Authors: Shull Austin Young , Choi Jeong-Hyeon , Bauer Jordan , Pei Lirong , Awan Farrukh T. , Shi Huidong 
Published: July 2016

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a malignancy characterized by the progressive accumulation of CD19+ B-cells capable of overcoming their regulated life cycle. Because this disease is highly heterogeneous and utilizes several mechanisms to resist apoptotic death, CLL currently remains incurable. Based on the ongoing efforts to interpret the transcriptional dynamics of CLL pathogenicity as well as prior reports demonstrating the efficacy of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) transcriptional inhibitors, we sought to characterize the molecular response of CLL cells treated with the covalent CDK7 inhibitor THZ1 and determine the therapeutic potential of CDK7 inhibition in CLL. We first observed that THZ1 was able to inhibit growth in malignant B-cell lines MEC1 and MEC2 in both a dose dependent (IC50: .045uM & .030uM, respectively) and time dependent manner. The inhibition in cell growth corresponded with both G1-mediated cell cycle arrest as well as apoptosis in the respective cell lines. We also observed dose-dependent reduction in cell viability through apoptosis in patient-derived CLL B-cells after 24 hours. Because of the observed outcomes of THZ1-treated CLL cells, we then wanted to determine the specific transcriptional targets significantly suppressed by THZ1 treatment. To identify the THZ1-sensitive transcripts, we performed a time course RNAseq expression analysis in both MEC1 and MEC2 treated with 50nM THZ1. Based on the incremental reduction of covered reads over a 12-hour period, we determined that the top 50 transcripts greatly diminished in both MEC1 and MEC2 contain significant enrichment in genes attributed to glycolytic metabolism (ex: ALDOC, SLC2A1, TPI1, GAPDH, ENO2). Along with the overlapping comparison between the two cell lines, we next compared the downregulated transcripts from the treated cell lines against the RNAseq expression profile of 47 CLL patients and 5 healthy donors. We observed that THZ1 was able to suppress transcripts upregulated in CLL patient samples including ENO2, FGR, WNT10A, and CBX7 in MEC1 and ENO2, MALAT1, CCR7, and PLCG1 in MEC2. Finally, we performed H3K27Ac ChIPseq in MEC1 to identify super enhancers that may overlap with THZ1-sensitive transcripts. From this comparison, we determined that super enhancers exist within reported oncogenic drivers CBX7, WNT10A, and FGR. Overall, we observe that THZ1 can effectively overcome the anti-apoptotic phenotype of CLL B-cells as well as directly suppress transcription of genes that can drive CLL malignancy. With the addition of CDK7 ChIPseq, our ultimate goal is to provide clarity regarding CDK7-mediated transcriptional regulation in CLL and demonstrate the molecular consequences of therapeutic CDK7 inhibition in CLL.

Citation Format: Austin Young Shull, Jeong-Hyeon Choi, Jordan Bauer, Lirong Pei, Farrukh T. Awan, Huidong Shi. The covalent CDK7 inhibitor THZ1 can counteract apoptotic resistance and suppress the transcription of genes attributed to chronic lymphocytic leukemia malignancy. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 4697.