Abstract P4-08-20: Inhibition of TACC3 blocks the growth of highly aggressive breast cancers with centrosome amplification
Authors: Saatci Ozge , Akbulut Ozge , Cetin Metin , Sikirzhytski Vitali , Sahin Ozgur 
Published: March 2023

Centrosome amplification (CA) is a hallmark of cancer that is strongly associated with highly aggressive disease and worse clinical outcome. Enhanced mitotic progression via clustering of extra centrosomes is a major coping mechanism utilized by cancer cells with CA that would otherwise undergo mitotic cell death due to formation of multipolar spindles. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms have largely been unexplored. Furthermore, mitosis-targeting inhibitors have mostly been unsuccessful in clinical settings with poor efficacy and severe side effects. Therefore, there is a dire need to uncover novel molecular mechanisms of CA-driven tumor growth and identify therapeutic targets playing key roles not only in mitosis, but also in interphase of cancer cells with CA to achieve durable anti-tumor effect with minimal toxicity. Here, we identified Transforming Acidic Coiled-Coil Containing Protein 3 (TACC3) as a novel CA-directed dependency, driving highly aggressive cell growth by forming distinct functional interactomes during cell cycle progression. We demonstrated, for the first time, that TACC3 interacts with the Kinesin Family Member C1 (KIFC1) via its TACC domain in mitotic cells with CA to promote centrosome clustering (CC) and facilitate mitotic progression. On the other hand, TACC3 interacts with the members of the nucleosome remodeling and deacetylase (NuRD) complex (HDAC2 and MBD2) in the nucleus of interphase cells with CA, thereby suppressing the transcription of key tumor suppressors to facilitate G1/S progression and cell survival. Inhibiting TACC3 in mitotic cells blocks the formation of TACC3/KIFC1 complex, leading to formation of multipolar spindles and activation of spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC)/CDK1/p-Bcl2 axis that ultimately results in mitotic cell death; whereas TACC3 inhibition in interphase cells blocks TACC3/HDAC2/MBD2 complex, leading to enhanced transcription of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors (e.g., p21 and p16) and apoptosis regulators (e.g., APAF1), ultimately causing p53-independent G1 arrest and strong apoptosis. Notably, inducing CA by chemical (cytochalasin D) or genomic (PLK4 overexpression or p53 loss) modulations renders cancer cells highly sensitive to TACC3 inhibition, showing the dependency of cells with CA to TACC3. Targeting TACC3 by small molecule inhibitors or CrispR-CAS9-mediated knock-out significantly reduces colony formation ability, inhibits the growth of organoids of patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) with CA, and strongly inhibits tumor growth in breast cancer cell line xenografts and PDXs with CA. Notably, we demonstrated that high CA tumors express much higher levels of TACC3, and high TACC3 expression, in association with its downstream effectors, KIFC1, HDAC2 and MBD2, leads to drastically worse clinical outcome in cancer patients with CA. Altogether, our results show, for the first time, that TACC3 is a multifunctional driver of the growth of the highly aggressive breast tumors with CA and that targeting TACC3 is a promising approach to tackle this aggressive disease.

Citation Format: Ozge Saatci, Ozge Akbulut, Metin Cetin, Vitali Sikirzhytski, Ozgur Sahin. Inhibition of TACC3 blocks the growth of highly aggressive breast cancers with centrosome amplification [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2022 Dec 6-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(5 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-08-20.