Abstract 634: The impact of IL-4 on migration in triple negative breast cancer cell lines

Abstract

Abstract In the United States, triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive form of breast cancer (BCa), disproportionately affects women of African descent and contributes to racial disparities in BCa mortality. Various risk factors are thought to drive this disparity, including socioeconomic status, tumor characteristics, comorbidities, and quality of treatment. Complex diseases and environmental insults all invoke and/or disrupt host inflammation, with individual immune and variable responses to therapeutic agents being dictated in part by genetic variants. This latter has seldom been studied with regards to precision diagnosis and prognosis of individual patient responses, in the frame of geographical ancestry and TNBC. Interleukin-4 receptors (IL4R) have been shown to be upregulated in many epithelial cancers and could be a promising target for metastatic tumor therapy. Yet, IL4R overexpression and/or IL4R variants have not been evaluated in TNBC cell lines of varying genetic ancestry. In view of this, we investigated the effects of IL-4 treatment in four TNBC cell lines varying in proportions of West African Ancestry (WAA) in each cell line: MDA-MB-231 (0.019), HCC-1143 (0.012), HCC-1806 (0.807), MDA-MB-468 (0.803). The frequency of IL4R variants also differed in each cell line. We used high content live cell imaging to evaluate the effect of IL-4 treatment on cellular migration by measuring wound healing. We show that IL-4 treatment on TNBC cells enhances migration as indicated by increased wound healing when compared to non-treated cells. High glucose, at a concentration of 10 g/L, delays cell migration in IL4-treated TNBC cells. This data suggests that comorbidities, such as high glucose levels (i.e., uncontrolled diabetes) could impact tumor behavior and mortality disparities between populations. Citation Format: Portia Andrews, Kevin S. Kimbro. The impact of IL-4 on migration in triple negative breast cancer cell lines [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 634.