Abstract 5365: Characterizing signaling in macrophage-GBM cell coculture
Authors: D'Souza Alicia D. , Mukkamala Rachit , Ahn Ryuhjin , White Forest M. 
Published: March 2024

Macrophages are a type of immune cell that play a crucial role in the tumor microenvironment. In tumors, macrophages can be polarized towards a pro-inflammatory phenotype, referred to as M1, or towards an anti-inflammatory and tumor-promoting phenotype, referred to as M2. M2 macrophages promote tumor growth by secreting cytokines that increase tumor proliferation, angiogenesis, and dampen the immune response from other immune cells such as T cells and dendritic cells. The balance between M1 and M2 macrophages in the tumor microenvironment is critical in determining the outcome of cancer progression and response to therapy. By understanding the pathways that lead to macrophage polarization, we can develop therapeutics that inhibit this process and support an anti-tumor macrophage response. Co-culture is a powerful model to study interactions between different cell types. We created co-cultures with macrophages and glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cells to understand how these cell-cell interactions can lead to altered cell phenotype. Several studies have looked at the interaction of two populations using a transwell system where one cell population is placed in a well with a permeable membrane and the other population is placed below, allowing for the exchange of soluble factors. However, this does not account for an important mode of cell-cell interaction, which is physical contact. Therefore, we tested how macrophages derived from primary monocytes polarized in the context of conditioned media (supernatant), cell lysate, and direct co-culture. We used U87-MG as a model GBM cell line. We assayed the M2 phenotype by using flow cytometry with CD163 as a marker. Our findings show that direct co-culture is crucial for promoting macrophage M2 polarization. Using our in vitro model for tumor-induced macrophage polarization, we conducted phosphoproteomic analysis to characterize signals associated with this phenotypic change. To study how co-culture induced differential signaling in tumor populations and macrophages, we devised a method to fix cells to preserve cell signaling, followed by separation using flow cytometry and LC-MS/MS analysis of individual cell populations. We created co-cultures of U87-MG tumor cells and macrophage-differentiated THP-1 cells, a monocyte cell line. We then tested whether our method could reliably separate the different populations, whether we could detect altered signals due to co-culture, and showcase how separating cell populations yields information that could not be gathered from bulk analysis of co-cultures. Our data shows that the analysis was highly reproducible and that the signaling from cells separated from co-culture was highly similar to signaling in cells that were grown individually. However, some phosphorylation residues were uniquely upregulated in the co-culture condition, pointing to signaling that may occur in response to tumor interaction.

Citation Format: Alicia D. D'Souza, Rachit Mukkamala, Ryuhjin Ahn, Forest M. White. Characterizing signaling in macrophage-GBM cell coculture [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 5365.