Browsing by Author "Adjei, Alex A."

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    Culture media composition influences patient-derived organoid ability to predict therapeutic responses in gastrointestinal cancers
    (American Society for Clinical Investigation, 2022-11-22) Hogenson, Tara L.; Xie, Hao; Phillips, William J.; Toruner, Merih D.; Li, Jenny J.; Horn, Isaac P.; Kennedy, Devin J.; Almada, Luciana L.; Marks, David L.; Carr, Ryan M.; Toruner, Murat; Sigafoos, Ashley N.; Koenig-Kappes, Amanda N.; Olson, Rachel Lo; Tolosa, Ezequiel J.; Zhang, Cheng; Li, Hu; Doles, Jason D.; Bleeker, Jonathan; Barrett, Michael T.; Boyum, James H.; Kipp, Benjamin R.; Mahipal, Amit; Hubbard, Joleen M.; Scheffler Hanson, Temperance J.; Petersen, Gloria M.; Dasari, Surendra; Oberg, Ann L.; Truty, Mark J.; Graham, Rondell P.; Levy, Michael J.; Zhu, Mojun; Billadeau, Daniel D.; Adjei, Alex A.; Dusetti, Nelson; Iovanna, Juan L.; Bekaii-Saab, Tanios S.; Ma, Wen Wee; Fernandez-Zapico, Martin E.; Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiology, School of Medicine
    BACKGROUND: A patient-derived organoid (PDO) platform may serve as a promising tool for translational cancer research. In this study, we evaluated PDO’s ability to predict clinical response to gastrointestinal (GI) cancers. METHODS: We generated PDOs from primary and metastatic lesions of patients with GI cancers, including pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, colorectal adenocarcinoma, and cholangiocarcinoma. We compared PDO response with the observed clinical response for donor patients to the same treatments. RESULTS: We report an approximately 80% concordance rate between PDO and donor tumor response. Importantly, we found a profound influence of culture media on PDO phenotype, where we showed a significant difference in response to standard-of-care chemotherapies, distinct morphologies, and transcriptomes between media within the same PDO cultures. CONCLUSION: While we demonstrate a high concordance rate between donor tumor and PDO, these studies also showed the important role of culture media when using PDOs to inform treatment selection and predict response across a spectrum of GI cancers.
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    Targeting PIM2 by JP11646 results in significant antitumor effects in solid tumors
    (Spandidos, 2022) Katsuta, Eriko; Gil-Moore, Malgorzata; Moore, Justine; Yousif, Mohamed; Adjei, Alex A.; Ding, Yi; Caserta, Justin; Baldino, Carmen M.; Lee, Kelvin P.; Gelman, Irwin H.; Takabe, Kazuaki; Opyrchal, Mateusz; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Proviral integration of Moloney virus 2 (PIM2) is a pro‑survival factor of cancer cells and a possible therapeutic target in hematological malignancies. However, the attempts at inhibiting PIM2 have yielded underwhelming results in early clinical trials on hematological malignancies. Recently, a novel pan‑PIM inhibitor, JP11646, was developed. The present study examined the utility of targeting PIM2 in multiple solid cancers and investigated the antitumor efficacy and the mechanisms of action of JP11646. When PIM2 expression was compared between normal and cancer tissues in publicly available datasets, PIM2 was found to be overexpressed in several types of solid cancers. PIM2 ectopic overexpression promoted tumor growth in in vivo xenograft breast cancer mouse models. The pan‑PIM inhibitor, JP11646, suppressed in vitro cancer cell proliferation in a concentration‑dependent manner in multiple types of cancers; a similar result was observed with siRNA‑mediated PIM2 knockdown, as well as an increased in cell apoptosis. By contrast, another pan‑PIM inhibitor, AZD1208, suppressed the expression of downstream PIM2 targets, but not PIM2 protein expression, corresponding to no apoptosis induction. As a mechanism of PIM2 protein degradation, it was found that the proteasome inhibitor, bortezomib, reversed the apoptosis induced by JP11646, suggesting that PIM2 degradation by JP11646 is proteasome‑dependent. JP11646 exhibited significant anticancer efficacy with minimal toxicities at the examined doses and schedules in multiple in vivo mice xenograft solid cancer models. On the whole, the present study demonstrates that PIM2 promotes cancer progression in solid tumors. JP11646 induces apoptosis at least partly by PIM2 protein degradation and suppresses cancer cell proliferation in vitro and in vivo. JP11646 may thus be a possible treatment strategy for multiple types of solid cancers.