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Naik A, Lattab B, Qasem H, Decock J. Cancer testis antigens: Emerging therapeutic targets leveraging genomic instability in cancer. MOLECULAR THERAPY. ONCOLOGY 2024; 32:200768. [PMID: 38596293 PMCID: PMC10876628 DOI: 10.1016/j.omton.2024.200768] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 04/11/2024]
Abstract
Cancer care has witnessed remarkable progress in recent decades, with a wide array of targeted therapies and immune-based interventions being added to the traditional treatment options such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. However, despite these advancements, the challenge of achieving high tumor specificity while minimizing adverse side effects continues to dictate the benefit-risk balance of cancer therapy, guiding clinical decision making. As such, the targeting of cancer testis antigens (CTAs) offers exciting new opportunities for therapeutic intervention of cancer since they display highly tumor specific expression patterns, natural immunogenicity and play pivotal roles in various biological processes that are critical for tumor cellular fitness. In this review, we delve deeper into how CTAs contribute to the regulation and maintenance of genomic integrity in cancer, and how these mechanisms can be exploited to specifically target and eradicate tumor cells. We review the current clinical trials targeting aforementioned CTAs, highlight promising pre-clinical data and discuss current challenges and future perspectives for future development of CTA-based strategies that exploit tumor genomic instability.
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Affiliation(s)
- Adviti Naik
- Cancer Research Center, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar
| | - Boucif Lattab
- Cancer Research Center, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar
| | - Hanan Qasem
- Cancer Research Center, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar
- College of Health and Life Sciences (CHLS), Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Doha, Qatar
| | - Julie Decock
- Cancer Research Center, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar
- College of Health and Life Sciences (CHLS), Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Doha, Qatar
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Kang T, Moore EC, Kopania EEK, King CD, Schilling B, Campisi J, Good JM, Brem RB. A natural variation-based screen in mouse cells reveals USF2 as a regulator of the DNA damage response and cellular senescence. G3 (BETHESDA, MD.) 2023; 13:jkad091. [PMID: 37097016 PMCID: PMC10320765 DOI: 10.1093/g3journal/jkad091] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/23/2023] [Revised: 03/30/2023] [Accepted: 04/06/2023] [Indexed: 04/26/2023]
Abstract
Cellular senescence is a program of cell cycle arrest, apoptosis resistance, and cytokine release induced by stress exposure in metazoan cells. Landmark studies in laboratory mice have characterized a number of master senescence regulators, including p16INK4a, p21, NF-κB, p53, and C/EBPβ. To discover other molecular players in senescence, we developed a screening approach to harness the evolutionary divergence between mouse species. We found that primary cells from the Mediterranean mouse Mus spretus, when treated with DNA damage to induce senescence, produced less cytokine and had less-active lysosomes than cells from laboratory Mus musculus. We used allele-specific expression profiling to catalog senescence-dependent cis-regulatory variation between the species at thousands of genes. We then tested for correlation between these expression changes and interspecies sequence variants in the binding sites of transcription factors. Among the emergent candidate senescence regulators, we chose a little-studied cell cycle factor, upstream stimulatory factor 2 (USF2), for molecular validation. In acute irradiation experiments, cells lacking USF2 had compromised DNA damage repair and response. Longer-term senescent cultures without USF2 mounted an exaggerated senescence regulatory program-shutting down cell cycle and DNA repair pathways, and turning up cytokine expression, more avidly than wild-type. We interpret these findings under a model of pro-repair, anti-senescence regulatory function by USF2. Our study affords new insights into the mechanisms by which cells commit to senescence, and serves as a validated proof of concept for natural variation-based regulator screens.
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Affiliation(s)
- Taekyu Kang
- Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
| | - Emily C Moore
- Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA
| | - Emily E K Kopania
- Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA
| | | | | | - Judith Campisi
- Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
| | - Jeffrey M Good
- Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA
| | - Rachel B Brem
- Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
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Habibi M, Taheri G. A new machine learning method for cancer mutation analysis. PLoS Comput Biol 2022; 18:e1010332. [PMID: 36251702 PMCID: PMC9612828 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010332] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/28/2022] [Revised: 10/27/2022] [Accepted: 10/05/2022] [Indexed: 11/23/2022] Open
Abstract
It is complicated to identify cancer-causing mutations. The recurrence of a mutation in patients remains one of the most reliable features of mutation driver status. However, some mutations are more likely to happen than others for various reasons. Different sequencing analysis has revealed that cancer driver genes operate across complex pathways and networks, with mutations often arising in a mutually exclusive pattern. Genes with low-frequency mutations are understudied as cancer-related genes, especially in the context of networks. Here we propose a machine learning method to study the functionality of mutually exclusive genes in the networks derived from mutation associations, gene-gene interactions, and graph clustering. These networks have indicated critical biological components in the essential pathways, especially those mutated at low frequency. Studying the network and not just the impact of a single gene significantly increases the statistical power of clinical analysis. The proposed method identified important driver genes with different frequencies. We studied the function and the associated pathways in which the candidate driver genes participate. By introducing lower-frequency genes, we recognized less studied cancer-related pathways. We also proposed a novel clustering method to specify driver modules. We evaluated each driver module with different criteria, including the terms of biological processes and the number of simultaneous mutations in each cancer. Materials and implementations are available at: https://github.com/MahnazHabibi/MutationAnalysis.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mahnaz Habibi
- Department of Mathematics, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran
| | - Golnaz Taheri
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
- Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm, Sweden
- * E-mail:
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Traynor S, Jakobsen ND, Ebbesen MF, Bennedsen SN, Johansen S, Ebstrup ML, Pedersen CB, Ditzel HJ, Brewer JR, Gjerstorff MF. SSX2 promotes the formation of a novel type of intranuclear lamin bodies. Int J Biochem Cell Biol 2021; 142:106121. [PMID: 34808373 DOI: 10.1016/j.biocel.2021.106121] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/13/2021] [Revised: 10/22/2021] [Accepted: 11/15/2021] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
Abstract
SSX proteins are normally restricted to spermatogenic cells, but ectopic expression can be observed in many types of human cancer. We recently demonstrated that SSX family members may contribute to tumorigenesis by modifying chromatin structure and, in specific settings, compromise chromatin stability. Here, we used normal and tumorigenic breast epithelial cell line models to further study the effect of ectopic expression of SSX2 on nuclear organization. We show that SSX2 induces the formation of a novel type of nucleoplasmic lamin bodies. Ectopic expression of SSX2 in various breast epithelial cell lines led to the formation of a previously undescribed type of intranuclear bodies containing both A and B type lamins but no other components of the nuclear lamina. SSX2-expressing cells contained a highly variable number of lamin bodies distributed throughout the nuclear space. SSX2-mediated establishment of intranuclear lamin bodies could not be linked to previous molecular interactions of SSX proteins, including polycomb proteins and the Mediator complex, but was, however, dependent on S-phase progression. These results reveal a novel interaction between SSX2 and lamins in the nucleoplasmic space. They further suggest that SSX2 promotes the formation of chromatin neighborhoods supporting the organization of lamins into nuclear bodies. We speculate that this may have implications for the organization and functional regulation of chromatin in cancer cells. Our study contributes to the further understanding of the biology of SSX proteins in tumorigenesis.
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Affiliation(s)
- S Traynor
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - N D Jakobsen
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - M F Ebbesen
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - S N Bennedsen
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - S Johansen
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - M L Ebstrup
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - C B Pedersen
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - H J Ditzel
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark; Department of Oncology, Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark; Academy of Geriatric Cancer Research (AgeCare), Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark
| | - J R Brewer
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - Morten F Gjerstorff
- Department of Cancer and Inflammation Research, Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark; Department of Oncology, Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark; Academy of Geriatric Cancer Research (AgeCare), Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark.
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