posted on 2023-08-01, 08:42authored byLing Cai, Ralph J. DeBerardinis, Yang Xie, John D. Minna, Guanghua Xiao
<p>NE score–associated protein and metabolic features are largely consistent in SCLC and neuroblastoma cell lines. Heat maps visualizing the relationship between NE scores and selected functional proteomic feature (<b>A</b>) or metabolites (<b>B</b>). In each heat map, the left-side column denotes the Pearson correlation between the selected feature on the row and the NE score. The top colored rows denote NE scores and SCLC TF expression. The features were selected on the basis of NE score correlation from the SCLC cell lines, adjusted <i>P</i> value (<i>P</i>.adj) < 0.05 was used to select RPPA features and <i>P</i>.adj < 0.1 was used to select metabolic features. Note that although the selection was made from SCLC cell lines, a very similar pattern could be observed in neuroblastoma cell lines. Scatterplots visualizing the relationship between selected RPPA (<b>C</b>) and metabolic (<b>D</b>) features and NE scores in neuroblastoma and SCLC cell lines.</p>
Funding
American Cancer Society (ACS)
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)
United States Department of Health and Human Services
Lineage plasticity has long been documented in both small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and neuroblastoma, two clinically distinct neuroendocrine (NE) cancers. In this study, we quantified the NE features of cancer as NE scores and performed a systematic comparison of SCLC and neuroblastoma. We found neuroblastoma and SCLC cell lines have highly similar molecular profiles and shared therapeutic sensitivity. In addition, NE heterogeneity was observed at both the inter- and intra-cell line levels. Surprisingly, we did not find a significant association between NE scores and overall survival in SCLC or neuroblastoma. We described many shared and unique NE score–associated features between SCLC and neuroblastoma, including dysregulation of Myc oncogenes, alterations in protein expression, metabolism, drug resistance, and selective gene dependencies.
Our work establishes a reference for molecular changes and vulnerabilities associated with NE to non-NE transdifferentiation through mutual validation of SCLC and neuroblastoma samples.