Growth inhibitory effect of the Src inhibitor dasatinib in combination with anticancer agents on uterine cervical adenocarcinoma cells

Engineering high throughput screening platforms of cervical cancer

Cervical cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in women under 40 and is one of the few cancers to have an increased incidence rate and decreased survival rate over the last 10 years. One in five patients will have recurrent and/or distant metastatic disease and these patients face a 5-year survival rate of less than 17%. Thus, there is a pressing need to develop new anticancer therapeutics for this underserved patient population. However, the development of new anticancer drugs remains a challenge, as only 7% of novel anticancer drugs are approved for clinical use. To facilitate identification of novel and effective anticancer drugs for cervical cancer, we developed a multilayer multicellular platform of human cervical cancer cell lines and primary human microvascular endothelial cells that interfaces with high throughput drug screening methods to evaluate the anti-metastatic and anti-angiogenic drug efficacy simultaneously. Through the use of design of experiments statistical optimization, we identified the specific concentrations of collagen I, fibrinogen, fibronectin, GelMA, and PEGDA in each hydrogel layer that maximized both cervical cancer invasion and endothelial microvessel length. We then validated the optimized platform and assessed its viscoelastic properties. Finally, using this optimized platform, we conducted a targeted drug screen of four clinically relevant drugs on two cervical cancer cell lines. Overall, this work provides a valuable platform that can be used to screen large compound libraries for mechanistic studies, drug discovery, and precision oncology for cervical cancer patients.

Dasatinib can enhance paclitaxel and gemcitabine inhibitory activity in human pancreatic cancer cells

SRC and its activated form, phospho-SRC (pSRC), are aberrantly activated in pancreatic cancer and SRC represents a potential target for pancreatic cancer therapy. In this paper, we examined the inhibitory effect of dasatinib, a potent SRC inhibitor in combination with paclitaxel or gemcitabine on human and murine pancreatic cancer cell lines. The results showed that p-SRC can be highly expressed in most human and mouse pancreatic cancer cell lines compared with normal human cell lines and can be induced by paclitaxel or gemcitabine in HPAC cells. Dasatinib can enhance the efficacy of paclitaxel or gemcitabine by reducing the cell viability and inhibiting the cell proliferation. Dasatinib with paclitaxel combination exhibits statistically greater inhibition of the cell migration ability than single agent alone, paclitaxel with gemcitabine or FOLFIRINOX (combination of fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin) in HAPC, PANC-1, and BXPC-3 human pancreatic cancer cell lines as well as 8-285 APR and 8-365 APR mouse pancreatic cancer cell lines. In addition, dasatinib with gemcitabine combination also showed statistically greater inhibition of cell migration than single agent alone, paclitaxel with gemcitabine, or FOLFIRINOX in HAPC, PANC-1 and 8-285 APR cells. The combination of dasatinib with paclitaxel or gemcitabine also showed greater inhibition of the colony formation ability of pancreatic cancer cells compared with single-agent monotherapy or FOLFIRINOX. Dasatinib with paclitaxel or gemcitabine combination also inhibits p-SRC, p-STAT3, p-AKT, and/or p-ERK in these pancreatic cancer cells. Therefore, our results support that combined dasatinib and paclitaxel or gemcitabine therapy may be a viable therapeutic approach for human pancreatic cancer.