Data from System-Level Analysis of Neuroblastoma Tumor–Initiating Cells Implicates AURKB as a Novel Drug Target for Neuroblastoma

Abstract

<div>Abstract<p><b>Purpose:</b> Neuroblastoma (NB) is an aggressive tumor of the developing peripheral nervous system that remains difficult to cure in the advanced stages. The poor prognosis for high-risk NB patients is associated with common disease recurrences that fail to respond to available therapies. NB tumor-initiating cells (TICs), isolated from metastases and primary tumors, may escape treatment and contribute to tumor relapse. New therapies that target the TICs may therefore prevent or treat tumor recurrences.</p><p><b>Experimental Design:</b> We undertook a system-level characterization of NB TICs to identify potential drug targets against recurrent NB. We used next-generation RNA sequencing and/or human exon arrays to profile the transcriptomes of 11 NB TIC lines from six NB patients, revealing genes that are highly expressed in the TICs compared with normal neural crest-like cells and unrelated cancer tissues. We used gel-free two-dimensional liquid chromatography coupled to shotgun tandem mass spectrometry to confirm the presence of proteins corresponding to the most abundant TIC-enriched transcripts, thereby providing validation to the gene expression result.</p><p><b>Results:</b> Our study revealed that genes in the BRCA1 signaling pathway are frequently misexpressed in NB TICs and implicated Aurora B kinase as a potential drug target for NB therapy. Treatment with a selective AURKB inhibitor was cytotoxic to NB TICs but not to the normal neural crest-like cells.</p><p><b>Conclusion:</b> This work provides the first high-resolution system-level analysis of the transcriptomes of 11 primary human NB TICs and identifies a set of candidate NB TIC-enriched transcripts for further development as therapeutic targets. Clin Cancer Res; 16(18); 4572–82. ©2010 AACR.</p></div>