This blog post originated as a press release from Tulane University.

Asim Abdel-Mageed, DVM, PhD, professor of urology and Marguerite Main Zimmerman Professor of Cancer Research at the Tulane School of Medicine, was recently honored by the journal Scientific Reports for authoring one of the top 100 accessed oncology papers for the journal in 2018.

His publication, “High-throughput screening identified selective inhibitors of exosome biogenesis and secretion: a drug repurposing strategy for advanced cancer”, received 3,154 article views, placing it seventh on the list, which features authors from around the world whose papers highlight valuable research in oncology.

The article reveals the results of research supported by a $4.2 million National Institutes of Health grant awarded to Abdel-Mageed in 2014. His project involved using a rapid high-volume robotic screening technique to investigate drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat a large variety of diseases or conditions to see which, if any, could also be effective in preventing prostate cancer metastasis.

Targeting Metastasis

For cancer cells to spread to other places in the body — or metastasize — they need to communicate with resident and recruited cells, such as stem cells. One way they do this is through biomolecular messages delivered in exosome cargos. Exosomes are molecules that carry information from cell to cell. “They are routinely biosynthesized and released by cancer cells, including prostate cancer, and are implicated in cancer progression,” said Abdel-Mageed.

Currently there are no known drugs that selectively target and inhibit the biosynthesis and release of exosomes by tumor cells. To accelerate the discovery of effective drugs, Abdel-Mageed and his team, in partnership with investigators at the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), investigated 4,580 known pharmacologically active compounds and found that 22 — including antibiotics, antifungal medicines and anti-inflammatory agents — were effective in preventing advanced prostate tumor cells from releasing exosomes or in blocking their production.

Future Work

Since the Scientific Reports publication, subsequent research by Abdel-Mageed’s team has further narrowed their investigation to five of these agents, and he hopes in the near future to receive additional funding to support this work.

“Drug repurposing is a golden opportunity,” said Abdel-Mageed. “Because drug discovery from concept to market takes an average time of 12 years, our identified drugs, which are already human approved, could be repurposed for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer within a relatively short period of time. It represents a quick way of adding an adjuvant therapy to existing therapies that might curb the progression of cancer.”

As a steering committee member of the National Institutes of Health Extracellular RNA Communication Consortium (ERCC), a summary of Abdel-Mageed’s study was also published as part of the ERCC leading-edge perspective paper in Cell.

Discovery May Help Explain Immunotherapy Resistance, Hints at New Therapies

Immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized cancer treatment: many patients with malignancies that until recently would have been considered untreatable are experiencing long-term remissions. But the majority of patients don’t respond to these drugs, and they work far better in some cancers than others, for reasons that have befuddled scientists. Now, UC San Francisco researchers have identified a surprising phenomenon that may explain why many cancers don’t respond to these drugs, and hints at new strategies to unleash the immune system against disease.

“In the best-case scenarios, like melanoma, only 20 to 30 percent of patients respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors, while in other cases, like prostate cancer, there is only a single-digit response rate,” said Robert Blelloch, MD, PhD, professor of urology at UCSF and senior author of the new study, published April 4 in Cell. “That means a majority of patients are not responding. We wanted to know why.”

In malignant tissue, a protein called PD-L1 functions as an “invisibility cloak”: by displaying PD-L1 on their surfaces, cancer cells protect themselves from attacks by the immune system. Some of the most successful immunotherapies work by interfering with PD-L1 or with its receptor, PD-1, which resides on immune cells. When the interaction between PD-L1 and PD-1 is blocked, tumors lose their ability to hide from the immune system and become vulnerable to anti-cancer immune attacks.

One reason that some tumors may be resistant to these treatments is that they do not produce PD-L1, meaning that there is nowhere for existing checkpoint inhibitors to act — that is, they may avoid the immune system using other checkpoint proteins yet to be discovered. Scientists have previously shown the PD-L1 protein to be present at low levels, or completely absent, in tumor cells of prostate cancer patients, potentially explaining their resistance to the therapy.

But in their new paper Blelloch’s group is suggesting a very different answer to this puzzle: PD-L1 is being mass-produced by these tumors, they found, but instead of displaying the protein on their surface, cancer cells export PD-L1 in molecular freighters known as exosomes. These PD-L1–packed exosomes sprout from cancer cells and travel through the lymphatic system or bloodstream to lymph nodes, the sites where immune cells are activated to protect the body. There, the PD-L1 proteins act as itinerant molecular saboteurs, remotely disarming immune cells and preventing them from locating tumors to mount an anti-cancer offensive.

So rather than shutting down the immune response at the tumor surface, exosomal PD-L1 can inhibit immune cells before they even arrive there. And unlike PD-L1 found on the tumor’s surface, exosomal PD-L1, for unclear reasons, is resistant to existing checkpoint inhibitors.

“The standard model says that PD-L1 acts on immune cells that travel to the tumor niche, where they encounter this immune-suppressing protein,” Blelloch said. “Our data suggests that this isn’t true for many immunotherapy-resistant tumors. These tumors evade the immune system by delivering exosomal PD-L1 to lymph nodes, where they inhibit the activation of immune cells remotely. These findings represent a break from dogma.”

Blelloch’s group decided to explore exosomes when they noticed something strange that suggested the standard model of PD-L1 presentation was flawed. Like scientists that came before, they found low levels of PD-L1 protein in resistant cancers. But when they looked at messenger RNA (mRNA), the molecular precursor of all proteins, they observed an odd discrepancy: there was far too much PD-L1 mRNA for the scant amount of PD-L1 protein that they measured in the cells.

“We saw the difference between mRNA and protein levels and wanted to figure out what was happening,” Blelloch said. “Our experiments also showed that the protein was in fact being made at some point, and that it wasn’t being degraded. That’s when we looked at exosomes and found the missing PD-L1.”

Exosomal PD-L1 Hampers Immune Response, Promotes Cancer Growth

To show that exosomal PD-L1 was responsible for imparting immune invisibility, the researchers turned to a mouse prostate cancer model that’s resistant to checkpoint inhibitors. When they transplanted these cancer cells into healthy mice, tumors rapidly sprouted. But when the scientists used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to delete two genes required for exosome production, the edited cancer cells were unable to form tumors in genetically identical mice. Though both edited and unedited cells were producing PD-L1, only those unable to create exosomes were visible and vulnerable to the immune system when PD-L1 was blocked.

“The importance of this discovery was immediately evident,” said postdoctoral fellow Mauro Poggio, PhD, lead author of the new study. “Currently in the clinic, there are no drugs available that are capable of counteracting the destructive power of exosomal PD-L1, so understanding the biology of exosomal PD-L1 is the first fundamental step that might lead to novel therapeutic approaches for patients.”

In a complementary experiment, the same CRISPR-edited cancer cells were transplanted into healthy mice, immediately followed by a series of injections of exosomes carrying PD-L1. Unable to produce exosomes, the CRISPR-edited cancer cells should have fallen victim to the immune system. Instead, the injected exosomes were able to neutralize the immune response on behalf of the cancer, which allowed the exosome-deficient cancer cells to form tumors.

To figure out how exosomal PD-L1 was interfering with the immune system, the researchers inspected the lymph nodes of mice that received either CRISPR-edited or unadulterated cancer cells. Mice that received the edited cells showed increased immune cell proliferation and had higher numbers of activated immune cells in their lymph nodes, the central command hubs of the immune system.

In a separate mouse model — a colorectal cancer that’s only partially responsive to immunotherapy — the researchers identified two distinct pools of PD-L1: one on the surface of tumor cells that’s sensitive to PD-L1 inhibitors, and another in exosomes that’s resistant. When they treated the cancer with a combination therapy that involved both preventing exosome formation and administering PD-L1 inhibitors, the mice survived longer than those treated with either approach alone.

“These data from two very different cancer models suggest a novel therapeutic approach, where suppressing the release of PD-L1 in exosomes, either alone or in combination with current checkpoint inhibitors, could overcome resistance in a large fraction of patients currently resistant to treatment with checkpoint inhibitors alone,” Blelloch said.

Exosome-Deficient Tumor Cells Can Act as ‘Vaccine’ Against Immune Resistance

In a surprising result from the new paper, the researchers found that they could use CRISPR-edited, exosome-deficient cancer cells to induce an anti-cancer immune response that targeted tumors that normally resist immune attack.

The researchers first transplanted CRISPR-edited cancer cells unable to produce exosomes into normal mice and waited 90 days. They then transplanted unedited — and presumably immune-evading — cancer cells into the same mice. After having exposed the immune system to the CRISPR-edited, exosome-deficient cancer cells, the unedited cells were no longer invisible. Instead of ignoring these cells, the immune system mounted a vigorous response that targeted these formerly immune-evading cancer cells and prevented them from proliferating.

“The immune system develops an anti-tumor memory after being exposed to cancer cells that can’t produce exosomal PD-L1. Once the immune system has developed memory, it is no longer sensitive to this form of PD-L1 and thus targets exosomal PD-L1–producing cancer cells as well,” Blelloch said.

Another surprising result was achieved when both unedited and CRISPR-edited, exosome-deficient cancer cells were simultaneously transplanted into opposite sides of the same mouse. Though they were introduced at the same time, the CRISPR-edited cells proved dominant — they were able to activate the immune system, which then launched an attack that destroyed the unedited, supposedly immune-resistant tumors growing on the other side.

These results suggest that even the temporary inhibition of the release of PD-L1 in exosomes could lead to long-term, body-wide suppression of tumor growth. Furthermore, they hint at the possibility of a new kind of immunotherapy, one in which a patient’s cancer cells can be edited and reintroduced in order to activate the immune system and goad it into attacking immune-resistant cancers. Suppressing the release of PD-L1 in exosomes or the introduction of the “tumor cell vaccine” devised by the Blelloch team may one day offer hope to patients whose tumors don’t respond to today’s treatment options.

“Much more needs to be uncovered about PD-L1’s function in cancer,” Poggio said. “We are just scratching the surface of what could be a new mechanism that, if blocked, has the potential to suppress many aggressive tumors that don’t currently respond to treatment.”

Authors: Additional authors on the paper include TJ Hu, Chien-Chun Pai, Brandon Chu, Cassandra D. Belair, Anthony Chang, Ursula E. Lang, Qi Fu, and Lawrence Fong of UCSF; Elizabeth Montabana of UC Berkeley.

Funding: Research was supported by the National Institutes of Health Common Fund Extracellular RNA Consortium, the George and Judy Marcus Innovation Fund, and an NIH training grant.

Conflicts: The authors declare no competing financial interests.

About UCSF: UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals – UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland – as well as Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics, UCSF Benioff Children’s Physicians and the UCSF Faculty Practice. UCSF Health has affiliations with hospitals and health organizations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF faculty also provide all physician care at the public Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, and the SF VA Medical Center. The UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program is a major branch of the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine. Please visit ucsf.edu/news.

This blog post originated as a press release from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have found a novel, previously unreported pathogenic entity that is a fundamental link between chronic inflammation and tissue destruction in the lungs of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. COPD is the fourth-leading cause of death in the world.

This pathogenic entity — exosomes from activated polymorphonuclear leukocytes, or PMNs — caused COPD damage when the small, subcellular particles, collected from purified PMNs, were instilled into the lungs of healthy mice. Remarkably, the UAB researchers also collected exosomes from the lung fluids of human patients with COPD and the lung fluids of neonatal ICU babies with the lung disease bronchopulmonary dysplasia; when those human-derived exosomes were instilled into the lungs of healthy mice, they also caused COPD lung damage. Damage was primarily from PMN-derived exosomes from the human lungs.

“This report seems to provide the first evidence of the capability of a defined non-infectious subcellular entity to recapitulate disease phenotype when transferred from human to mouse,” said J. Edwin Blalock, Ph.D., professor of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine in the UAB Department of Medicine. “I think this could be a very profound discovery. A lot of what we have found here will apply in other tissues, depending on the disease.”

Other diseases marked by immune cell inflammation and tissue destruction include heart attacks, metastatic cancer, and chronic kidney disease. The activated PMN exosomes may also contribute to lung damage in other lung diseases that have excessive PMN-driven inflammation, such as cystic fibrosis. The study is reported in the journal Cell.

“These findings highlight a novel role of the innate immune response in chronic lung diseases and could be used for the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics for COPD and possibly cystic fibrosis,” said James Kiley, Ph.D., director of the Division of Lung Diseases at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Background
COPD, a smoking-associated disease, is marked by PMN-driven inflammation in the lungs. Damage to the lung tissue leads to airway obstruction, shortness of breath, and respiratory failure. PMN immune cells, also known as neutrophils, are part of the body’s white blood cell defense against infections and tissue damage. They comprise 60 percent of the body’s white blood cells, or about 2.5 billion PMNs in each pint of blood. PMNs are voracious eaters of microbes or damaged human cells after activation by a signal of infection.

All cells shed exosomes. These tiny extracellular membrane-bound vesicles can be mediators of cell-to-cell communication, and they can ferry a diverse cargo of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids from cell to cell. The UAB research focused on a recently found third role for exosomes — the ability to harbor protease enzymes.

Activated PMNs are known to release neutrophil elastase, or NE, a protease that can degrade type I collagen and elastin. The collagen and elastin proteins help form the extracellular matrix that glues cells together. In the lungs, the extracellular matrix and lung cells are sheets of tissue that help form the tiny alveoli, where the lung exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide. In COPD, the damaged alveoli enlarge, reducing oxygen exchange and forcing the heart to pump harder to push blood through the lungs.

NE and other proteases from PMNs can attack microbes. Healthy lungs are protected by anti-proteases that can inhibit the proteases. Normally, NE is inhibited by a robust barrier of alpha1-antitrypsin in the lung.

The research
Blalock and fellow researchers investigated whether NE might exist in an exosomal form and whether such exosomes might bypass alpha1-antitrypsin inhibition to contribute to inflammatory lung disease.

They found that exosomes from quiescent PMNs did not cause COPD when transferred to healthy mice. In contrast, exosomes from activated PMNs did cause COPD, as measured by histologic changes of the alveoli, increased pulmonary resistance and enlargement of the right heart ventricle that pumps blood to the lung.

 
The activated PMN exosomes were covered with enzymatically active surface-bound NE, while quiescent PMN exosomes had none. This surface NE was resistant to alpha1-antitrypsin inhibition; the exosomes from activated PMNs degraded collagen, they caused emphysema when put into mouse lungs, and they carried the PMN cell-surface markers CD63 and CD66b that identify them as coming from PMNs. Human COPD lung-derived exosomes carrying those PMN cell-surface markers conferred COPD to mice.

A very large dose of purified NE — enough to overwhelm the alpha1-antitrypsin barrier — can cause alveolar enlargement in mice. Because the exosome-bound NE was protected against apha1-antitrypsin inhibition, researchers found that the dose of activated PMN exosomes needed to cause the same damage as purified NE was 10,000 times less.

The activated PMN exosomes had another cause for their aggressive proteolysis — they carried integrin Mac-1 on their surface. Integrin Mac-1 allowed the exosomes to bind directly to collagen fibrils, a second mechanism besides protected NE for why the proteolytic exosomes exert an outsized degradative capacity in relation to their size and protease load.

“This investigation reveals an entirely unappreciated aspect of the interplay between inflammation, proteolysis and matrix remodeling with far-reaching implications for future research,” Blalock said. “Our report significantly expands the biological repertoire of the exosome, demonstrating potent biological effects of these particles ex cellula.”

Looking ahead
The study also suggests therapeutic strategies to interrupt pathogenic aspects of PMN exosome function: 1) disrupting the ionic binding of the NE to the exosome, to dislodge the NE and make it susceptible to alpha1-antitrypsin; 2) inhibiting the exosomal integrin Mac-1 to block collagen binding; and 3) directly inhibiting the exosomal NE with small-molecule compounds.

Blalock is also interested in another big question — exosome activity in healthy smokers.

“Only one in seven or one in eight smokers gets COPD,” he said. “It would be an amazing outcome if we found activated PMN exosomes in a subpopulation of people who smoke.” Those people could then be warned of the risk they faced.

This Cell study took six years of work.

Significant research was done by co-first authors Kristopher Genschmer, Ph.D., and Derek W. Russell, M.D., who were NIH T32 grant trainees with Blalock. Both are assistant professors in the UAB Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine. Amit Gaggar, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine, is co-senior author with Blalock, and he is a former trainee who did his Ph.D. with Blalock. Co-author Charitharth Vivek Lal, M.D., assistant professor in the UAB Pediatrics Division of Neonatology, is the physician who collected the lung fluid from neonates and performed all of the bronchopulmonary dysplasia work.
 

Co-authors with Genschmer, Russell, Gaggar, Lal and Blalock of the paper “Activated PMN exosomes: Pathogenic entities causing matrix destruction and disease in the lung” are Tomasz Szul, Mojtaba Abdul Roda, Xin Xu, Liliana Viera, Tarek H. Abdalla, Robert W. King, J. Michael Wells and Mark T. Dransfield, UAB Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine; Preston E. Bratcher, National Jewish Medical Center, Denver, Colorado; Brett D. Noerager, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama; Gabriel Rezonzew, UAB Department of Pediatrics; Brian S. Dobosh, Camilla Margaroli and Rabindra Tirouvanziam, Department of Pediatrics, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia; and Carmel M. McNicholas, UAB Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology.

This study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants HL135710, HL077783, HL114439, HL110950, HL126596, HL102371, HL126603, HL123940, HL105346-07 and HL105346-05; American Heart Association grant 17SDG32720009; and Veterans Affairs grant BX001756.

Blalock is a distinguished professor in the UAB School of Medicine, and he holds the Nancy E. Dunlap, M.D., Endowed Chair in Pulmonary Disease.

Reference
Genschmer KR, Russell DW, et al. Activated PMN Exosomes: Pathogenic Entities Causing Matrix Destruction and Disease in the Lung. Cell (2019) 176: 113-126. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.12.002. PMID: 30633902.