Abstract 6082: Uveal melanoma exosomes express MET and re-program the recipient cells
Authors: Ambrosini Grazia , Rai Alex J. , Ebert Blake , Schwartz Gary K. 
Published: September 2020

Uveal melanoma (UM) is a rare melanoma subtype with an estimated annual incidence of approximately 2000 in the United States. Despite excellent rates of local disease control with surgery or radiotherapy, nearly 50% of patients will develop metastatic disease, mostly to the liver, with a life expectancy of 12 months. The receptor tyrosine kinase MET is overexpressed in 60-86% of cases and, together with its ligand HGF, it plays a significant role in UM migration and metastasis. In recent years, it has been demonstrated that tumor cells communicate with the microenvironment at distant organs by secreting exosomes, extracellular small vesicles released into body fluids, to support cancer development, immune evasion and metastatic progression. Exosomes are able to stably transfer their unique cargos of proteins and RNA from the primary tumor to distant sites, such as the pre-metastatic “niche”. The functional role of UM exosomes in the tumor microenvironment cross-talk is largely unknown. To get deeper insight into UM exosome biology, we have isolated exosomes from UM cells before and after treatment with the MET inhibitor crizotinib and examined their content by proteomic analysis. Approximately 600 proteins were identified from each of these samples, with 444 proteins in common and 145 and 167 proteins uniquely detected in exosomes from untreated and treated cells, respectively. The expression of several exosome-associated proteins, including MET, were suppressed by crizotinib, suggesting that the exosomal cargo can be pharmacologically manipulated. Exposure of normal hepatocytes to UM-derived exosomes results in activation of MET in a dose dependent fashion, with induction of both the MAPK and AKT/PI3K pathways. Exosomes derived from serum of patients with advanced uveal melanoma also express MET and induced similar effects in hepatocytes. Furthermore, UM-derived exosomes activate the expression of pro-angiogenic and pro-inflammatory factors in normal hepatocytes, while exosomes isolated from crizotinib-treated UM cells reduced these effects. UM-derived exosomes also stimulated immune cells to release cytokines and chemokines, including IL-6, IL-8 CCL2, CCL3, CCL5 and CXCL1. Functionally, we demonstrated that conditioned media from exosome-treated hepatocyte highly stimulated UM cell migration, which could be repressed by the combination of MET and cytokine receptor inhibitors. These findings provide evidence that UM derived exosomes play a role in reprogramming the recipient cells to facilitate the establishment of metastasis, and the inhibition of exosome-mediated signaling may provide a potential therapeutic strategy in the early stages of metastasis.

Citation Format: Grazia Ambrosini, Alex J. Rai, Blake Ebert, Gary K. Schwartz. Uveal melanoma exosomes express MET and re-program the recipient cells [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 6082.