Club cells form lung adenocarcinomas and maintain the alveoli of adult mice
- University of Patras, Greece
- Helmholtz Center Munich, Germany
- German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Germany
- Biomedical Sciences Research Center Alexander Fleming, Greece
- Evangelismos Hospital, Greece
Abstract
Lung cancer and chronic lung diseases impose major disease burdens worldwide and are caused by inhaled noxious agents including tobacco smoke. The cellular origins of environmental-induced lung tumors and of the dysfunctional airway and alveolar epithelial turnover observed with chronic lung diseases are unknown. To address this, we combined mouse models of genetic labeling and ablation of airway (club) and alveolar cells with exposure to environmental noxious and carcinogenic agents. Club cells are shown to survive KRAS mutations and to form lung tumors after tobacco carcinogen exposure. Increasing numbers of club cells are found in the alveoli with aging and after lung injury, but go undetected since they express alveolar proteins. Ablation of club cells prevents chemical lung tumors and causes alveolar destruction in adult mice. Hence club cells are important in alveolar maintenance and carcinogenesis and may be a therapeutic target against premalignancy and chronic lung disease.
Data availability
All raw data produced in this study are provided as *.xlsx source data Supplements. The microarray data produced by this study were deposited at GEO (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/; Accession ID: GSE94981). Previously reported [36-40] murine ATII and human AEC, ATII, AMΦ, non-smokers lung, and LUAD microarray data are available at GEO using Accession IDs GSE82154, GSE55459, GSE46749, GSE18816, and GSE43458).
-
Epithelial signatures of chemical-induced lung adenocarcinomaGene Expression Omnibus GSE94981.
-
Plasticity of airway epithelial cell transcriptome in response to flagellin.NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE55459.
-
Vitamin D deficiency contributes directly to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE46749.
-
ETS2 mediated tumor suppressive function and MET oncogene inhibition in human non-small cell lung cancer.NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE43458.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
H2020 European Research Council (260524)
- Georgios T Stathopoulos
Hellenic State Scholarship Foundation (Post-doctoral Research Fellowship)
- Magda Spella
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (International Research Scholars Award)
- Rocio Sotillo
German Center for Lung Research
- Kristina AM Arendt
- Laura V Klotz
- Georgios T Stathopoulos
Hellenic Thoracic Society (PhD Fellowship)
- Malamati Vreka
- Anastasios D Giannou
H2020 European Research Council (281614)
- Rocio Sotillo
H2020 European Research Council (679345)
- Georgios T Stathopoulos
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Experiments were designed and approved a priori by the Veterinary Administration of the Prefecture of Western Greece (approval numbers 3741/16.11.2010, 60291/3035/19.03.2012, and 118018/578/30.04.2014) and were conducted according to Directive 2010/63/EU (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1486710385917&uri=CELEX:32010L0063).
Human subjects: Archival tissue samples of patients with lung adenocarcinoma were used in this study. The observational protocol for the original studies adhered to the Helsinki Declaration and was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Hospital of Patras, and all patients gave written informed consent.
Copyright
© 2019, Spella et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 4,787
- views
-
- 652
- downloads
-
- 47
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Club cells form lung adenocarcinomas and maintain the alveoli of adult mice
eLife 8:e45571.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45571
Further reading
-
- Cancer Biology
Background:
Cervical adenocarcinoma (ADC) is more aggressive compared to other types of cervical cancer (CC), such as squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) and tumor heterogeneity are recognized as pivotal factors in cancer progression and therapy. However, the disparities in TIME and heterogeneity between ADC and SCC are poorly understood.
Methods:
We performed single-cell RNA sequencing on 11 samples of ADC tumor tissues, with other 4 SCC samples served as controls. The immunochemistry and multiplexed immunofluorescence were conducted to validate our findings.
Results:
Compared to SCC, ADC exhibited unique enrichments in several sub-clusters of epithelial cells with elevated stemness and hyper-malignant features, including the Epi_10_CYSTM1 cluster. ADC displayed a highly immunosuppressive environment characterized by the enrichment of regulatory T cells (Tregs) and tumor-promoting neutrophils. The Epi_10_CYSTM1 cluster recruits Tregs via ALCAM-CD6 signaling, while Tregs reciprocally induce stemness in the Epi_10_CYSTM1 cluster through TGFβ signaling. Importantly, our study revealed that the Epi_10_CYSTM1 cluster could serve as a valuable predictor of lymph node metastasis for CC patients.
Conclusions:
This study highlights the significance of ADC-specific cell clusters in establishing a highly immunosuppressive microenvironment, ultimately contributing to the heightened aggressiveness and poorer prognosis of ADC compared to SCC.
Funding:
Funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82002753; 82072882; 81500475) and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (2021JJ40324; 2022JJ70103).
-
- Cancer Biology
Most human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) are not infiltrated with cytotoxic T cells and are highly resistant to immunotherapy. Over 90% of PDAC have oncogenic KRAS mutations, and phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI3Ks) are direct effectors of KRAS. Our previous study demonstrated that ablation of Pik3ca in KPC (KrasG12D; Trp53R172H; Pdx1-Cre) pancreatic cancer cells induced host T cells to infiltrate and completely eliminate the tumors in a syngeneic orthotopic implantation mouse model. Now, we show that implantation of Pik3ca−/− KPC (named αKO) cancer cells induces clonal enrichment of cytotoxic T cells infiltrating the pancreatic tumors. To identify potential molecules that can regulate the activity of these anti-tumor T cells, we conducted an in vivo genome-wide gene-deletion screen using αKO cells implanted in the mouse pancreas. The result shows that deletion of propionyl-CoA carboxylase subunit B gene (Pccb) in αKO cells (named p-αKO) leads to immune evasion, tumor progression, and death of host mice. Surprisingly, p-αKO tumors are still infiltrated with clonally enriched CD8+ T cells but they are inactive against tumor cells. However, blockade of PD-L1/PD1 interaction reactivated these clonally enriched T cells infiltrating p-αKO tumors, leading to slower tumor progression and improve survival of host mice. These results indicate that Pccb can modulate the activity of cytotoxic T cells infiltrating some pancreatic cancers and this understanding may lead to improvement in immunotherapy for this difficult-to-treat cancer.
