Abstract B05: Cloning and vulnerability of intrinsically resistant subset of ovarian cancer stem cells

High-grade ovarian cancer is extremely sensitive to chemotherapy and yet usually lethal due to recurrent disease. To address the underlying mechanism of chemotherapy resistance in this disease, we employed novel technology developed to clone normal adult epithelial stem cells to generate libraries of patient-specific, clonogenic tumor cells. These clones possess hallmarks of “cancer stem cells” including long-term self-renewal and recapitulation of tumors of appropriate histology in immunodeficient mice. Significantly, these clonogenic tumor cells possess the overall pattern of genomic alterations of the whole tumor and yet display clone-specific patterns of variation reflecting intratumor heterogeneity that is stable despite months of continuous propagation. Our analyses at the clonal level have revealed a subset that display an intrinsic, pretherapy resistance to paclitaxel and hypervariable genomics in contrast to the bulk of clones sampled from the library. These intrinsically resistant clones share genomic and gene expression profiles with those surviving paclitaxel treatment of the whole library, suggesting a role for intrinsically resistant cells in recurrent disease. Remarkably, known drugs that interfere with signaling pathways enriched in both intrinsically resistant and paclitaxel survivor clones are synthetically lethal with standard-of-care chemotherapy. The targeting of intrinsically resistant clones from patient-specific libraries of cancer stem cells offers new strategies for preempting recurrent disease.

Citation Format: Guoqiang Chang, Jinxiu Li, Bailiang Wang, Yusuke Yamamoto, Rajasekaran Mahalingam, Marcin Duleba, Wei Rao, Jingzhong Xie, Shan Wang, Amir Jazaeri, Peter Davies, Suzy Torti, Giulio Draetta, Matthew Anderson, Molly Brewer, Christopher Crum, Frank McKeon, Wa Xian. Cloning and vulnerability of intrinsically resistant subset of ovarian cancer stem cells. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Conference: Addressing Critical Questions in Ovarian Cancer Research and Treatment; Oct 1-4, 2017; Pittsburgh, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2018;24(15_Suppl):Abstract nr B05.