Mediating the death of dormant tumor cells

Yuying Liu; Jiadi Lv; Bo Huang

doi:10.1080/23723556.2018.1458013

Mediating the death of dormant tumor cells

Mol Cell Oncol. 2018 Aug 6;5(4):e1458013. doi: 10.1080/23723556.2018.1458013. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Yuying Liu^{1

2}, Jiadi Lv², Bo Huang^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ National Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Biology & Department of Immunology, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Clinical Immunology Center, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
² Clinical Immunology Center, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Wuhan, China.

Abstract

How immunological cues trigger cancer cell-intrinsic signaling pathways for their entering dormancy remains an enigma. In out recent studies, we found that IFN-β induces tumor-repopulating cells (TRC) into dormancy by activating Indoleamine-pyrrole 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO)-Kynurenine-aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR)-cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 1B (p27) pathway, while blocking this pathway leads dormant TRCs to apoptosis by switching to STAT3-cellular tumor antigen p53 (p53) pathway.

Keywords: Indoleamine-pyrrole 2,3-dioxygenase; aryl hydrocarbon receptor; immune cytokine; kynurenine; tumor dormancy; tumor-repopulating cells.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (81788101, 81661128007, 81530080, 81773062), CAMS Initiative for Innovative Medicine (2016-I2M-1-007).