Abstract POSTER-BIOL-1346: Growth-suppressive effect of WRN RECQ helicase inactivation in breast and ovarian cancer cells
Authors: Welcsh Piri , Kehrli Keffy , Lazarchuk Paul , Sidorova Julia 
Published: August 2015

One important and high-yielding paradigm in the development of novel, targeted anticancer therapies is to identify genes that are not essential to normal cells but that have become critically important to particular cancer cells as they rely on these genes for survival. This concept, sometimes called addiction of cancer cells to specific genes or pathways can be exploited in the clinic because the function of the genes that cancer cells are addicted to can be disrupted using genetic or chemical manipulation, leading to selective killing of cancer cells while normal cells are minimally affected. For example, it was shown that homologous recombination-defective BRCA1-deficient cancer cells rely heavily on other repair pathways such as NHEJ, one of the pathways facilitated by PARP1. This finding has led to clinical trials designed to determine if PARP inhibitor drugs are an effective treatment for patients with BRCA1-deficient breast and ovarian cancer.

We have previously discovered, via a high throughput screen, that simultaneous deficiency in BRCA1 and the WRN RECQ helicase resulted in additive growth-suppressive phenotype in human fibroblasts. WRN is a gene mutated in the Werner syndrome of premature aging, and it is a multifunctional exonuclease/helicase involved in maintenance of genomic stability. Congenital loss of WRN also predisposes to sarcomas and melanomas, though interestingly, not to the most common type of age-related cancer – carcinoma. Near-complete inactivation of WRN in human fibroblasts and common cell lines such as sarcoma-derived U2OS and HT1080, is typically non-lethal, though somewhat reduces cellular growth rate and fitness.

Following our original observation, we were interested to determine whether loss of WRN is synthetically lethal with loss of BRCA1 in breast and ovarian cancer cell lines, and if loss of WRN restores sensitivity to platinum or impairs growth in platinum resistant clones derived from breast and ovarian cancer cell lines.

Our results show that depletion of WRN in BRCA1-negative or positive breast or ovarian cancer cell lines dramatically suppresses their growth. Both in breast and ovarian cancer cells, at least some of this growth suppression could be attributed to the induction of RNAi-triggered cytotoxicity by WRN downregulation. In addition, WRN depletion also hypersensitized the HCC1937 breast cancer cell line to platinum, however this effect of WRN was attenuated in platinum-resistant clones derived in vitro from this line. Strikingly, non-cancerous mammary epithelial line MCF10a showed virtually no growth suppression by WRN depletion, suggesting that breast and ovarian cancer cells may be more reliant on WRN than normal cells of at least some of the relevant epithelial lineages — which is a therapeutically exploitable trait. We are currently following up on this observation using other non-cancerous epithelial cells, such as primary mammary and fallopian tube epithelial cells, as well as primary human keratinocytes. We will present these data as well as the update on reproducing WRN growth-suppressive phenotype using small molecule inhibitors of WRN.

Significance: Our results highlight WRN as a potential novel target for development of breast and ovarian cancer therapies.

Citation Format: Piri Welcsh, Keffy Kehrli, Paul Lazarchuk, Julia Sidorova. Growth-suppressive effect of WRN RECQ helicase inactivation in breast and ovarian cancer cells [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Ovarian Cancer Research Symposium; Sep 8-9, 2014; Seattle, WA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2015;21(16 Suppl):Abstract nr POSTER-BIOL-1346.