Abstract 5634: Tristetraprolin induces an antitumorigenic phenotype in triple negative breast cancer via a novel non-canonical mechanism
Authors: Rutherford Julia L. , Stemberger Megan B. , Mahmud Rohaan , Ross Christina R. , White Elizabeth J. , Wilson Gerald M. 
Published: March 2024

The ultimate cause of death for most triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients is metastatic disease, which has a five-year survival rate of 12.8%. This low survival rate is partly due to the lack of targeted treatments for metastatic TNBC, resulting from the heterogeneity of the disease. As such, further research is needed to identify novel molecular mechanisms that can be targeted to suppress TNBC malignancy. Tristetraprolin (TTP) is an RNA-binding protein that binds to AU-rich elements (AREs) in the 3’ UTRs of select mRNAs, including many that encode proteins involved in cancer-related processes, and targets these mRNAs for degradation. Loss of TTP in tumors correlates with increased disease severity and decreased survival, suggesting a role as a tumor suppressor in multiple cancers, including breast cancer. While previous research has shown that TTP can suppress proliferation in breast cancer, the mechanism remains weakly defined. To elucidate how TTP impacts tumorigenic phenotypes in advanced breast cancer, we stably transfected a FLAG-TTP-expressing construct into three aggressive and metastatic TNBC cell lines. We analyzed TTP-induced changes in gene expression patterns among these cell lines using RNA-sequencing and observed that TTP alters the expression levels of many genes. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) of our datasets revealed that TTP affects multiple pathways, including significant suppression of pathways that promote cell growth, various metabolic processes contributing to tumor growth, and the response to hypoxia. As these pathways highly associated with tumorigenesis, we hypothesized that TTP would attenuate multiple tumor phenotypes. Our subsequent functional analyses revealed that TTP potently suppressed four tumor phenotypes in these cell models: cell proliferation, stem cell frequency, migration, and invasiveness. We hypothesized that inhibition of proliferation was mediated by cell cycle alterations, however, flow cytometry analysis revealed no substantial cell cycle perturbations between TTP-expressing cells and controls. Further analysis of cell cycle regulators revealed minimal changes in expression of proteins encoded by known or suspected TTP target mRNAs. Actinomycin D assays surprisingly revealed that TTP had no effect on the decay kinetics of several known TTP targets, suggesting that TTP’s antitumorigenic properties observed in TNBC cells are independent of its RNA-destabilizing function. To confirm this finding, we constructed cell models expressing an RNA-binding defective mutant of TTP, C147R, which recapitulated suppression of the four tumorigenic phenotypes seen with the wild-type protein. Collectively, these findings reveal that expression of TTP can potently suppress several oncogenic phenotypes in TNBC cells via a mechanism independent of its canonical RNA-binding/destabilizing functions.

Citation Format: Julia L. Rutherford, Megan B. Stemberger, Rohaan Mahmud, Christina R. Ross, Elizabeth J. White, Gerald M. Wilson. Tristetraprolin induces an antitumorigenic phenotype in triple negative breast cancer via a novel non-canonical mechanism [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 5634.