Hao-Chien Hung , Tsui-Lien Mao , Ke-Hung Tsui , Ming-Huei Fan , Ainani Priza Minhalina , Chao-Lien Liu
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background
Ovarian cancer (OC) is a highly lethal gynecological malignancy, mainly due to chemoresistance and tumor recurrence. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) may be responsible for chemoresistance, and CSC has become a new target for treatment. In this study, we aimed to develop a three-dimensional (3D) OC model with well-recapitulated stemness in the tumor microenvironment (TME).
Results
We observed that the niche-like environment associated with CSC properties is characterized by the presence of CD133-positive cells during OC sphere induction. The cancer-associated fibroblast (CAF)-integrated 3D multicellular OC model recapitulates enhanced tumorigenicity and cytokine-mediated invasiveness more than the 2D monolayer culture. Chemoresistance of the 3D OC model is also acquired. In addition, the in vivo growth of an established xenograft model with a 3D CAF-integrated OC sphere exhibits proper stemness features and full cancer-associated markers for tumorigenesis.
After transduction of the CD133 gene into OC cells, gene ontology (GO) and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses reveal that cytokine-mediated endothelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) is possibly responsible for chemotherapy resistance and tumor progression, and enhanced PAR1, CXCR4, and PD-L1 expressions are also observed. In addition, we found that engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cells targeting PAR1 demonstrated significant in vitro cytotoxicity toward chemoresistant OC sphere with CD133 overexpression.
Conclusions
Taken together, our results show that a CD133-3D OC sphere recaptures TME that mimics a real late-stage OC condition, and it can act as a useful platform with mechanism-verifying in vitro and in vivo experiments in researching OC chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and cell therapy to discover new therapeutic approaches.
期刊介绍:
Cellular Immunology publishes original investigations concerned with the immunological activities of cells in experimental or clinical situations. The scope of the journal encompasses the broad area of in vitro and in vivo studies of cellular immune responses. Purely clinical descriptive studies are not considered.
Research Areas include:
• Antigen receptor sites
• Autoimmunity
• Delayed-type hypersensitivity or cellular immunity
• Immunologic deficiency states and their reconstitution
• Immunologic surveillance and tumor immunity
• Immunomodulation
• Immunotherapy
• Lymphokines and cytokines
• Nonantibody immunity
• Parasite immunology
• Resistance to intracellular microbial and viral infection
• Thymus and lymphocyte immunobiology
• Transplantation immunology
• Tumor immunity.