Abstract 2069: Overcoming drug resistance by targeting melanoma dedifferentiation through information-theoretic analysis and single cell proteomics

Abstract

Abstract Despite impressive initial response of BRAF targeted therapy in mestastic melanoma patients, acquired drug resistance, often times derived from tumor heterogeneity, always limit its clinical outcome. A dedifferentiation process named melanocyte to neural crest transition (MNT) has shown to be critical in the early stage resistance development. The dedifferentiation could induce a whole cell state change resulting a drug tolerant state of melanoma cells, which will lead to initial drug resistance. Mathematic modeling indicates the nature of the transition as results of both stochastic phenotypic transition and non-genetic drug selection, which indicates and further proved that the whole cell state transition should be reversible during drug removal. Information theoretic analysis reduced the dimensional of thousands of gene expression level changes as results of only two unbalanced processes onto a cellular steady state. Reversible transition trajectory defined through two processes indicates it to resemble a critical transition in physical systems. Refined single cell proteomic analysis of those proteins that associate with major unbalanced processes identify the critical points of the transition as early as day6, which cannot be resolved from bulk proteomic measurement. By co-targeting the drivers at the critical points in combination with original brafi targeted drug successfully arrested the transition and induced a sustained tumor growth inhibition in multiple patient-derived melanoma cell lines. This study provides us a noval methodology of mining whole transcriptomic transition with information theoretic analysis to reduce the dimensionality and then using single cell proteomic analysis for refining critical points and driver proteins which eventually rationalized a effective combination therapy to stop the drug resistance development early on. Citation Format: Yapeng SU, Wei Wei, Lidia Robert, Jennifer Tsoi, Min Xue, Jungwoo Kim, Thomas Graeber, Raphael Levine, Antoni Ribas, James Heath. Overcoming drug resistance by targeting melanoma dedifferentiation through information-theoretic analysis and single cell proteomics [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 2069. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-2069