|
|
|
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Department of Medicine and the Rebecca and John Moores Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
Received for publication January 16, 2006.
Accepted for publication July 17, 2006.
| Abstract |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Copper transporter 1 (CTR1) is the major copper influx transporter. Deletion of the yCTR1 gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae markedly reduces the accumulation of all three clinically available platinum-containing chemotherapeutic agents (Ishida et al., 2002
; Lin et al., 2002
). A preliminary study suggested that the cellular accumulation of DDP was also impaired in embryonic fibroblasts established from mice in which both mCTR1 alleles had been disrupted (Ishida et al., 2002
). Forced overexpression of hCTR1 in human ovarian carcinoma cells enhanced DDP uptake (Holzer et al., 2003
). Increased hCTR1 expression in human small-cell lung cancer cells (Song et al., 2004
) was reported to enhance the uptake of DDP, CBDCA, and L-OHP but overexpression of hCTR1 in human squamous carcinoma cells was reported to have no effect on DDP uptake (Beretta et al., 2004
). Such forced overexpression of hCTR1 is toxic to human cells, and it is not clear that CTR1 functions normally at such high intracellular levels, as evidenced by the finding that increased CTR1 expression and DDP uptake into the whole cell is accompanied by minimal change in sensitivity to the cytotoxic effect of the drug and DNA adduct formation (Holzer et al., 2004
).
The amino acid sequence of murine CTR1 shares 92% homology with human CTR1 (Kuo et al., 2001
). Whereas deletion of both mCTR1 alleles produced embryonic lethality, CTR1+/+ and CTR1-/- embryo fibroblast cell lines were successfully established from the parental and knockout mice (Lee et al., 2001
). To refine understanding of how CTR1 modulates the cellular pharmacology of the platinum-containing drugs, we carried out further investigations using this isogenic pair of mouse embryo fibroblasts. We report here quantitative studies of the effect of loss of mCTR1 function on cellular accumulation of the three clinically used platinum-containing drugs and on sensitivity to the cytotoxic effects of these agents. The results indicate that CTR1 regulates the cellular accumulation of all three drugs at concentrations attainable in humans but that at 5-fold higher concentrations, although accumulation of DDP and CBDCA is still CTR1-dependent, L-OHP accumulation becomes CTR1-independent, indicating that it is a substrate for another cell-entry mechanism.
| Materials and Methods |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Cell Lines. The murine embryonic fibroblasts, originally isolated from day-7 embryos and immortalized using SV40 large T antigen, were cultured as described previously (Lee et al., 2002
). Cells were grown in 20% fetal bovine serum, 2 mM glutamine, 1x nonessential amino acids, 55 µM 2-mercaptoethanol, 50 mg/liter uridine, and 110 mg/ml pyruvate.
Measurement of 64Cu Accumulation. Copper uptake measurements were made using cell cultures that were 80% confluent in the 30 mm wells of a six-well plate. After the addition of prewarmed media containing 2 µM 64CuSO4, the plates were incubated at 37°C in 5% CO2 for 30 min. At the end of the incubation period, the plates were placed on ice, and the wells were rinsed three times with 3 ml of ice-cold phosphate-buffered saline. Cell lysis buffer (0.1% Triton-X and 1% SDS in phosphate-buffered saline) in a volume of 500 µl was added to the wells, and the lysate was harvested by scraping the dish twice before it was transferred to tubes for
counting on a Beckman Gamma 5500B (Beckman Coulter, Fullerton, CA). Six cultures were harvested for each data point. Lysates from a set of identical cultures not exposed to 64CuSO4 were used to measure protein concentration.
Platinum Accumulation Assays. Cells were plated in sixwell plates in media without any drugs. Once the cultures were 80% confluent, 2 or 10 µM DDP, 2, 10, or 12 µM CBDCA, or 2, 6, or 10 µM L-OHP was added, and plates were incubated at 37°C in 5% CO2 for 1 h. The plates were then placed on ice, and wells were rinsed three times with 3 ml of ice-cold phosphate-buffered saline. Cells were harvested by dissolving them in 70% nitric acid at 65°C for at least 2 h. Samples were diluted to 5% nitric acid with water containing 1 ppb indium and 0.1% Triton X-100. Platinum content was determined using inductively coupled plasmon mass spectroscopy (Element2; PerkinElmer Life Sciences, Boston, MA) on an instrument available through the Analytical Facility at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (San Diego, CA). Lysates from a set of identical cultures suspended in 0.1% Triton X-100 and 1% SDS in phosphate-buffered saline were used to measure protein concentration.
Drug Sensitivity Assay. Six-well plates were seeded with 1000 cells per well, and 24 h later, the medium was replaced with medium containing various concentrations of either DDP, CBDCA, L-OHP, or copper. After 3 days of continuous exposure, cultures were trypsinized and stained with trypan blue. The number of live cells per well was determined by counting cells that excluded trypan blue with a hemocytometer. Each drug concentration was tested in six cultures per cell line, and each experiment was repeated three times.
Statistics. Tests of significance used a two-sided paired Student's t test with the assumption of unequal variance; p values of <0.05 were considered significant. All p values are for the comparison of the values for the CTR1+/+ versus the CTR1-/- cells.
| Results |
|---|
|
|
|---|
counting. This concentration of copper is near the Km value of 1 µM reported for murine CTR1 (Lee et al., 2002
|
Effect of the Loss of CTR1 on DDP, CBDCA, and L-OHP Accumulation. The accumulation of the platinum-containing drugs was quantified by measuring the platinum content of the whole cell after a 1-h exposure to either 2 or 10 µM DDP, CBDCA, or L-OHP or concentrations that were found to be equitoxic to human ovarian carcinoma cells in clonogenic assays performed in an earlier study (Samimi et al., 2004b
). The equitoxic concentrations of the drugs were 2 µM for DDP, 12 µM for CBDCA, and 6 µM for L-OHP. This resulted in data on the accumulation in CTR1+/+ and CTR1-/- cells being available for two concentrations of DDP and three concentrations for CBDCA and L-OHP. As shown in Table 1, when exposed to 2 µM DDP for 1 h, the CTR1-/- cells accumulated only 36.3% as much platinum as the CTR1+/+ cells. The magnitude of the effect of the loss of CTR1 expression was no less when the accumulation was measured after a 1-h exposure to 10 µM DDP. A similar pattern was observed for CBDCA. When exposed to a concentration of 2 µM, the CTR1-/- cells accumulated only 35.1% as much platinum as the CTR1+/+ cells, and the magnitude of this deficit was only slightly less at 10 or 12 µM. However, L-OHP exhibited a different pattern. When the cells were exposed to 2 µM L-OHP, the loss of CTR1 had a substantial effect, and the accumulation in the CTR1-/- cells was only 36.3% of that in the CTR1+/+ cells. However, as the concentration of L-OHP was increased first to 6 and then to 10 µM, the magnitude of the effect of the loss of CTR1 diminished to the point at which there was no deficit at 10 µM.
|
|
| Discussion |
|---|
|
|
|---|
36% of that in the wild-type cells. In the case of DDP and CBDCA, this deficit in accumulation was still evident when cells were exposed to a 5-fold higher concentration; however, in the case of L-OHP, the deficit produced by the loss of CTR1 disappeared at the higher concentration. This suggests that CTR1 contributes importantly to the cellular uptake of all three drugs at the low concentrations typically attained in patient plasma, whereas at higher concentrations, L-OHP enters the cell predominantly via another mechanism.
S. cerevisiae express two high-affinity copper influx transporters, yCTR1 and yCTR3 (Petris, 2004
). Knockout of yCTR1 in yeast in which yCTR3 was disabled reduced the accumulation of DDP, CBCDA, and L-OHP similar to the results obtained with the CTR1+/+ and CTR1-/- mouse embryo fibroblasts (Ishida et al., 2002
; Lin et al., 2002
). Thus, despite the fact that yCTR1 contains eight N-terminal copper-binding motifs while mCTR1 contains only two, both transporters seem to function similarly with respect to platinum drug accumulation.
In the mammalian cells, there was an association between the extent to which platinum drug uptake was impaired in the CTR1-/- cells and the extent to which sensitivity to the growth-inhibitory effect of the drug was reduced. The loss of CTR1 had a greater effect on the potency of DDP than CBDCA, but inspection of the curves in Fig. 1 indicates that even at very high drug concentrations, CTR1 was still important to the growth-inhibitory effect of these drugs. This suggests that other routes of entry for DDP and CBDCA into the cell do not become dominant over CTR1, even at high drug concentrations. In contrast, loss of CTR1 had less effect on the growth-inhibitory potency of L-OHP, consistent with the observation that the concentration required to inhibit growth was already greater than that at which the deficit in accumulation produced by loss of CTR1 had disappeared.
The fact that deletion of CTR1 did not completely eliminate DDP and CBDCA accumulation indicates that CTR1 is not the only route by which these drugs enter mammalian cells. This mirrors the situation for copper; even though the loss of CTR1 reduced copper uptake by 94%, and this transporter is essential for embryonic viability, copper nevertheless enters the cell in amounts sufficient to sustain growth. To date, no other transporter has definitively been shown to mediate the influx of copper in mammalian cells (Lee et al., 2002
). Likewise, loss of CTR1 function reduced DDP and CBDCA uptake to only 36% of control, indicating that there is yet another mechanism by which DDP and CBDCA enter cells that has not yet been characterized.
The results of this study provide strong evidence that, at low concentrations, CTR1 mediates cellular accumulation of all three platinum-containing drugs currently used in patients but that L-OHP differs from DDP and CBDCA in that its dependence on CTR1 diminishes at higher concentrations. The concept that these drugs have different influx transporters is consistent with their different spectrum of action against various types of human cancer. The structures of DDP, CBDCA, and L-OHP are shown in Fig. 2. L-OHP differs from DDP and CBDCA in that it contains a bulky diaminocyclohexane ring, a feature that seems to make it a substrate for a non-CTR1-dependent entry mechanism at higher concentrations. Given the exquisite specificity of CTR1 for copper relative to other metal ions, it is surprising that any of these drugs is a substrate for the CTR1-mediated accumulation mechanism.
| Acknowledgements |
|---|
| Footnotes |
|---|
ABBREVIATIONS: DDP, cisplatin; L-OHP, oxaliplatin; CBDCA, carboplatin; CTR1, copper transporter 1.
Address correspondence to: Dr. Stephen B. Howell, Moores UCSD Cancer Center, 3855 Health Sciences Drive, Room 3344, La Jolla, CA 92093-0819. E-mail: showell{at}ucsd.edu
| References |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Andrews PA, Jones JA, Varki NM, and Howell SB (1990) Rapid emergence of acquired cis-diamminedichloroplatinum(II) resistance in an in vivo model of human ovarian carcinoma. Cancer Commun 2: 93-100.
Beretta GL, Gatti L, Tinelli S, Corna E, Colangelo D, Zunino F, and Perego P (2004) Cellular pharmacology of cisplatin in relation to the expression of human copper transporter CTR1 in different pairs of cisplatin-sensitive and -resistant cells. Biochem Pharmacol 68: 283-291.[CrossRef][Medline]
Gately DP and Howell SB (1993) Cellular accumulation of the anticancer agent cisplatin: a review. Br J Cancer 67: 1171-1176.[Medline]
Holzer A, Samimi G, Katano K, Naedermann W, and Howell SB (2003) The role of human copper transporter hCTR1 in cisplatin uptake in human ovarian carcinoma cells. Proc Am Assoc Cancer Res 44: 923.
Holzer AK, Samimi G, Katano K, Naerdemann W, Lin X, Safaei R, and Howell SB (2004) The copper influx transporter human copper transport protein 1 regulates the uptake of cisplatin in human ovarian carcinoma cells. Mol Pharmacol 66: 817-823.
Ishida S, Lee J, Thiele DJ, and Herskowitz I (2002) Uptake of the anticancer drug cisplatin mediated by the copper transporter Ctr1 in yeast and mammals. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99: 14298-14302.
Katano K, Kondo A, Safaei R, Holzer A, Samimi G, Mishima M, Kuo Y-M, Rochdi M, and Howell S (2002) Acquisition of resistance to cisplatin is accompanied by changes in the cellular pharmacology of copper. Cancer Res 62: 6559-6565.
Kuo YM, Zhou B, Cosco D, and Gitschier J (2001) The copper transporter CTR1 provides an essential function in mammalian embryonic development. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98: 6836-6841.
Lee J, Petris MJ, and Thiele DJ (2002) Characterization of mouse embryonic cells deficient in the Ctr1 high affinity copper transporter. J Biol Chem 277: 40253-40259.
Lee J, Prohaska JR, and Thiele DJ (2001) Essential role for mammalian copper transporter Ctr1 in copper homeostasis and embryonic development. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98: 6842-6847.
Lin X, Okuda T, Holzer A, and Howell SB (2002) The copper transporter CTR1 regulates cisplatin uptake in saccharomyces cerevisiae. Mol Pharmacol 62: 1154-1159.
Naredi P, Heath DD, Enns RE, and Howell SB (1995) Cross-resistance between cisplatin, antimony potassium tartrate, and arsenite in human tumor cells. J Clin Investig 95: 1193-1198.[Medline]
Petris MJ (2004) The SLC31 (Ctr) copper transporter family. Pflueg Arch Eur J Physiol 447: 752-755.[CrossRef][Medline]
Romach EH, Zhao CQ, Del Razo LM, Cebrian ME, and Waalkes MP (2000) Studies on the mechanisms of arsenic-induced self tolerance developed in liver epithelial cells through continuous low-level arsenite exposure. Toxicol Sci 54: 500-508.
Safaei R, Holzer AK, Katano K, Samimi G, and Howell SB (2004a) The role of copper transporters in the development of resistance to Pt drugs. J Inorg Biochem 98: 1607-1613.[CrossRef][Medline]
Safaei R, Katano K, Samimi G, Naerdemann W, Stevenson JL, Rochdi M, and Howell SB (2004b) Cross-resistance to cisplatin in cells with acquired resistance to copper. Cancer Chemother Pharmacol 53: 239-246.[CrossRef][Medline]
Samimi G, Katano K, Holzer AK, Safaei R, and Howell SB (2004a) Modulation of the cellular pharmacology of cisplatin and its analogs by the copper exporters ATP7A and ATP7B. Mol Pharmacol 66: 25-32.
Samimi G, Safaei R, Katano K, Holzer AK, Rochdi M, Tomioka M, Goodman M, and Howell SB (2004b) Increased expression of the copper efflux transporter ATP7A mediates resistance to cisplatin, carboplatin and oxaliplatin in ovarian cancer cells. Clin Cancer Res 10: 4661-4669.
Siddik ZH (2003) Cisplatin: mode of cytotoxic action and molecular basis of resistance. Oncogene 22: 7265-7279.[CrossRef][Medline]
Song IS, Savaraj N, Siddik ZH, Liu P, Wei Y, Wu CJ, and Kuo MT (2004) Roles of copper transporter Ctr1 in the transport of platinum-based antitumor agents in cisplatin-sensitive and resistant cells. Mol Cancer Ther 3: 1543-1549.
Tobey RA and Tesmer JG (1985) Differential response of cultured human normal and tumor cells to trace element-induced resistance to the alkylating agent melphalan. Cancer Res 45: 2567-2571.
This article has been cited by other articles:
![]() |
B. G. Blair, C. A. Larson, R. Safaei, and S. B. Howell Copper Transporter 2 Regulates the Cellular Accumulation and Cytotoxicity of Cisplatin and Carboplatin Clin. Cancer Res., July 1, 2009; 15(13): 4312 - 4321. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
N. Pabla, R. F. Murphy, K. Liu, and Z. Dong The copper transporter Ctr1 contributes to cisplatin uptake by renal tubular cells during cisplatin nephrotoxicity Am J Physiol Renal Physiol, March 1, 2009; 296(3): F505 - F511. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
C. A. Larson, B. G. Blair, R. Safaei, and S. B. Howell The Role of the Mammalian Copper Transporter 1 in the Cellular Accumulation of Platinum-Based Drugs Mol. Pharmacol., February 1, 2009; 75(2): 324 - 330. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
D. D. Jandial, S. Farshchi-Heydari, C. A. Larson, G. I. Elliott, W. J. Wrasidlo, and S. B. Howell Enhanced Delivery of Cisplatin to Intraperitoneal Ovarian Carcinomas Mediated by the Effects of Bortezomib on the Human Copper Transporter 1 Clin. Cancer Res., January 15, 2009; 15(2): 553 - 560. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||