Citation Information: JCI Insight. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1172/jci.insight.143643.
Abstract
Rewiring tumor cells to undergo drug-induced apoptosis could be a promising way to overcome chemoresistance, therefore identifying causative factors for chemoresistance is of high importance. Global proteome-profiling of sensitive, early and late cisplatin resistant OSCC lines identified CMTM6 as a top ranked up-regulated protein. Analyses of OSCC patient tumor samples demonstrated significantly higher CMTM6 expression in chemotherapy-non-responders as compared to responders. In addition, a significant association between higher CMTM6 expression and poorer relapse-free survival in ESCC, HNSCC was monitored from Kaplan-Meier-Plot analysis. Stable knockdown of CMTM6 restores cisplatin-mediated cell death in chemoresistant OSCC cell lines. Similarly, upon CMTM6 overexpression in CMTM6KD lines, the cisplatin resistant phenotype was efficiently rescued. The patient-derived cell xenograft model of chemoresistant OSCC displayed CMTM6 depletion restored the cisplatin-induced cell death and tumor burden significantly. The transcriptome analysis of CMTM6KD and control chemoresistant cells depicted enrichment of Wnt-signaling pathway. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that CMTM6 interaction with membrane bound Enolase-1 stabilized its expression, leading to AKT-GSK3β mediated activation of Wnt-signaling. CMTM6 has been identified as a stabilizer of PD-L1 thereby facilitates immune evasion by tumor cells. As CMTM6 facilitates tumor cells for immune evasion and mediates cisplatin resistance, it can be an important therapeutic target for therapy resistant OSCC.
Authors
Pallavi Mohapatra, Omprakash Shriwas, Sibasish Mohanty, Arup Ghosh, Shuchi Smita, Sandeep Rai Kaushik, Rakesh Arya, Rachna Rath, Saroj Das Majumdar, Dillip Kumar Muduly, Sunil Raghav, Ranjan K. Nanda, Rupesh Dash
