BETs abet Tam-R in ER-positive breast cancer

Peptide Inhibitor Targeting the Extraterminal Domain in BRD4 Potently Suppresses Breast Cancer Both In Vitro and In Vivo

BRD4 is associated with a variety of human diseases, including breast cancer. The crucial roles of amino-terminal bromodomains (BDs) of BRD4 in binding with acetylated histones to regulate oncogene expression make them promising drug targets. However, adverse events impede the development of the BD inhibitors. BRD4 adopts an extraterminal (ET) domain, which recruits proteins to drive oncogene expression. We discovered a peptide inhibitor PiET targeting the ET domain to disrupt BRD4/JMJD6 interaction, a protein complex critical in oncogene expression and breast cancer. The cell-permeable form of PiET, TAT-PiET, and PROTAC-modified TAT-PiET, TAT-PiET-PROTAC, potently inhibits the expression of BRD4/JMJD6 target genes and breast cancer cell growth. Combination therapy with TAT-PiET/TAT-PiET-PROTAC and JQ1, iJMJD6, or Fulvestrant exhibits synergistic effects. TAT-PiET or TAT-PiET-PROTAC treatment overcomes endocrine therapy resistance in ERα-positive breast cancer cells. Taken together, we demonstrated that targeting the ET domain is effective in suppressing breast cancer, providing a therapeutic avenue in the clinic.

BRD4 Inhibition as a Strategy to Prolong the Response to Standard of Care in Estrogen Receptor-Positive Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring malignancy in women and the second most common cause of cancer-related deaths. ER+ breast cancer constitutes approximately 70% of all breast cancer cases. The standard of care for ER+ breast cancer involves estrogen antagonists such as tamoxifen or fulvestrant in combination with CDK4/6 inhibitors such as palbociclib. However, these treatments are often not curative, with disease recurrence and metastasis being responsible for patient mortality. Overexpression of the epigenetic regulator, BRD4, has been shown to be a negative prognostic indicator in breast cancer, and BET family inhibitors such as ARV-825 and ABBV-744 have garnered interest for their potential to improve and prolong the response to current therapeutic strategies. The current work examined the potential of utilizing ARV-825 and ABBV-744 to increase the effectiveness of tamoxifen or fulvestrant plus palbociclib. ARV-825 was effective in both p53 wild-type (WT) breast tumor cells and in cells lacking functional p53 either alone or in combination with tamoxifen, while the effectiveness of ABBV-744 was limited to fulvestrant plus palbociclib in p53 WT cells. These differential effects may be related to the capacity to suppress c-Myc, a downstream target of BRD4.

HBXIP blocks myosin-IIA assembly by phosphorylating and interacting with NMHC-IIA in breast cancer metastasis

Tumor metastasis depends on the dynamic balance of the actomyosin cytoskeleton. As a key component of actomyosin filaments, non-muscle myosin-IIA disassembly contributes to tumor cell spreading and migration. However, its regulatory mechanism in tumor migration and invasion is poorly understood. Here, we found that oncoprotein hepatitis B X-interacting protein (HBXIP) blocked the myosin-IIA assemble state promoting breast cancer cell migration. Mechanistically, mass spectrometry analysis, co-immunoprecipitation assay and GST-pull down assay proved that HBXIP directly interacted with the assembly-competent domain (ACD) of non-muscle heavy chain myosin-IIA (NMHC-IIA). The interaction was enhanced by NMHC-IIA S1916 phosphorylation via HBXIP-recruited protein kinase PKCβII. Moreover, HBXIP induced the transcription of PRKCB, encoding PKCβII, by coactivating Sp1, and triggered PKCβII kinase activity. Interestingly, RNA sequencing and mouse metastasis model indicated that the anti-hyperlipidemic drug bezafibrate (BZF) suppressed breast cancer metastasis via inhibiting PKCβII-mediated NMHC-IIA phosphorylation in vitro and in vivo. We reveal a novel mechanism by which HBXIP promotes myosin-IIA disassembly via interacting and phosphorylating NMHC-IIA, and BZF can serve as an effective anti-metastatic drug in breast cancer.

The emerging role of BET inhibitors in breast cancer

Bromodomain and extraterminal domain (BET) proteins are epigenetic molecules that regulate the expression of multiple genes involved in carcinogenesis. Breast cancer is an heterogenous disease emerging from aberrant gene expression and epigenetic alteration patterns. Amplification or overexpression of BET proteins has been identified in breast tumors highlighting their clinical significance. Development of BET inhibitors that disrupt BET protein binding to acetylated lysine residues of chromatin and suppress transcription of various oncogenes has shown promising results in breast cancer cells and xenograft models. Currently, Phase I/II clinical trials explore safety and efficacy of BET inhibitors in solid tumors and breast cancer. Treatment-emergent toxicities have been reported, including thrombocytopenia and gastrointestinal disorders. Preliminary results demonstrated greater response rates to BET inhibitors in combination with already approved anticancer agents. Consistently, BET inhibition sensitized breast tumors to chemotherapy drugs, hormone therapy and PI3K inhibitors in vitro. This article aims to review all existing preclinical and clinical evidence regarding BET inhibitors in breast cancer.

Acetylation of histone H3K27 signals the transcriptional elongation for estrogen receptor alpha

As approximately 70% of human breast tumors are estrogen receptor α (ERα)-positive, estrogen and ERα play essential roles in breast cancer development. By interrupting the ERα signaling pathway, endocrine therapy has been proven to be an effective therapeutic strategy. In this study, we identified a mechanism by which Transcription Start Site (TSS)-associated histone H3K27 acetylation signals the Super Elongation Complex (SEC) to regulate transcriptional elongation of the ESR1 (ERα) gene. SEC interacts with H3K27ac on ESR1 TSS through its scaffold protein AFF4. Depletion of AFF4 by siRNA or CRISPR/Cas9 dramatically reduces expression of ESR1 and its target genes, consequently inhibiting breast cancer cell growth. More importantly, a AFF4 mutant which lacks H3K27ac interaction failed to rescue ESR1 gene expression, suggesting H3K27 acetylation at TSS region is a key mark bridging the transition from transcriptional initiation to elongation, and perturbing SEC function can be an alternative strategy for targeting ERα signaling pathway at chromatin level.

Drugging transcription in heart failure

Advances in our understanding of the basic biology and biochemistry of chromatin structure and function at genome scales has led to tremendous growth in the fields of epigenomics and transcriptional biology. While it has long been appreciated that transcriptional pathways are dysregulated in failing hearts, only recently has the idea of disrupting altered transcription by targeting chromatin-associated proteins been explored. Here, we provide a brief overview of efforts to drug transcription in the context of heart failure, focusing on the bromo- and extra-terminal domain (BET) family of chromatin co-activator proteins.

Epigenetic therapies in heart failure

Heart failure (HF) is a dominant cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world, with available pharmacotherapies limited by high rates of residual mortality and a failure to directly target the changes in cell state that drive adverse cardiac remodeling. Pathologic cardiac remodeling is driven by stress-activated cardiac signaling cascades that converge on defined components of the chromatin regulatory apparatus in the nucleus, triggering broad shifts in transcription and cell state. Thus, studies focusing on how cytosolic signaling pathways couple to the nuclear gene control machinery has been an area of therapeutic interest in HF. In this review, we discuss current concepts pertaining to the role of chromatin regulators in HF pathogenesis, with a focus on specific proteins and RNA-containing macromolecular complexes that have shown promise as druggable targets in the experimental setting.

TRPS1 regulates oestrogen receptor binding and histone acetylation at enhancers

The chromatin state is finely tuned to regulate function and specificity for transcription factors such as oestrogen receptor alpha (ER), which contributes to cell growth in breast cancer. ER transcriptional potential is mediated, in large part, by the specific associated proteins and co-factors that interact with it. Despite the identification and characterisation of several ER coregulators, a complete and systematic view of ER-regulating chromatin modifiers is lacking. By exploiting a focused siRNA screen that investigated the requirement for a library of 330 chromatin regulators in ER-mediated cell growth, we find that the NuRD and coREST histone deacetylation complexes are critical for breast cancer cell proliferation. Further, by proteomic and genomics approaches, we discover the transcription factor TRPS1 to be a key interactor of the NuRD and coREST complexes. Interestingly, TRPS1 gene amplification occurs in 28% of human breast tumours and is associated with poor prognosis. We propose that TRPS1 is required to repress spurious binding of ER, where it contributes to the removal of histone acetylation. Our data suggest that TRPS1 is an important ER-associated transcriptional repressor that regulates cell proliferation, chromatin acetylation and ER binding at the chromatin of cis-regulatory elements.

The BET inhibitor I-BET762 inhibits pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cell proliferation and enhances the therapeutic effect of gemcitabine

As one of the most fatal malignancies, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has significant resistance to the currently available treatment approaches. Gemcitabine, the standard chemotherapeutic agent for locally advanced and metastatic PDAC, has limited efficacy, which is attributed to innate/acquired resistance and the activation of prosurvival pathways. Here, we investigated the in vitro efficacy of I-BET762, an inhibitor of the bromodomain and extraterminal (BET) family of proteins, in treating PDAC cell lines alone and in combination with gemcitabine (GEM). The effect of these two agents was also examined in xenograft PDAC tumors in mice. We found that I-BET762 induced cell cycle arrest in the G0/G1 phase and cell death and suppressed cell proliferation and metastatic stem cell factors in PDAC cells. In addition, the BH3-only protein Bim, which is related to chemotherapy resistance, was upregulated by I-BET762, which increased the cell death triggered by GEM in PDAC cells. Moreover, GEM and I-BET762 exerted a synergistic effect on cytotoxicity both in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, Bim is necessary for I-BET762 activity and modulates the synergistic effect of GEM and I-BET762 in PDAC. In conclusion, we investigated the effect of I-BET762 on PDAC and suggest an innovative strategy for PDAC treatment.

BEclear: Batch Effect Detection and Adjustment in DNA Methylation Data

Batch effects describe non-natural variations of, for example, large-scale genomic data sets. If not corrected by suitable numerical algorithms, batch effects may seriously affect the analysis of these datasets. The novel array platform independent software tool BEclear enables researchers to identify those portions of the data that deviate statistically significant from the remaining data and to replace these portions by typical values reconstructed from neighboring data entries based on latent factor models. In contrast to other comparable methods that often use some sort of global normalization of the data, BEclear avoids changing the apparently unaffected parts of the data. We tested the performance of this approach on DNA methylation data for various tumor data sets taken from The Cancer Genome Atlas and compared the results to those obtained with the existing algorithms ComBat, Surrogate Variable Analysis, RUVm and Functional normalization. BEclear constantly performed at par with or better than these methods. BEclear is available as an R package at the Bioconductor project http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/BEclear.html.

The changing role of ER in endocrine resistance

Estrogen receptor (ER) is expressed in approximately 70% of newly diagnosed breast tumors. Although endocrine therapy targeting ER is highly effective, intrinsic or acquired resistance is common, significantly jeopardizing treatment outcomes and minimizing overall survival. Even in the presence of endocrine resistance, a continued role of ER signaling is suggested by several lines of clinical and preclinical evidence. Indeed, inhibition or down-regulation of ER reduces tumor growth in preclinical models of acquired endocrine resistance, and many patients with recurrent ER+ breast tumors progressing on one type of ER-targeted treatment still benefit from sequential endocrine treatments that target ER by a different mechanism. New insights into the nature and biology of ER have revealed several mechanisms sustaining altered ER signaling in endocrine-resistant tumors, including deregulated growth factor receptor signaling that results in ligand-independent ER activation, unbalanced ER co-regulator activity, and genomic alterations involving the ER gene ESR1. Therefore, biopsies of recurrent lesions are needed to assess the changes in epi/genomics and signaling landscape of ER and associated pathways in order to tailor therapies to effectively overcome endocrine resistance. In addition, more completely abolishing the levels and activity of ER and its co-activators, in combination with selected signal transduction inhibitors or agents blocking the upstream or downstream targets of the ER pathway, may provide a better therapeutic strategy in combating endocrine resistance.