Project description:Cardiotoxicity remains a major cause of drug withdrawal, partially due to lacking predictability of animal models. Additionally, risk of cardiotoxicity following treatment of cancer patients is treatment limiting. It is unclear which patients will develop heart failure following therapy. Human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes present an unlimited cell source and may offer individualized solutions to this problem. We developed a platform to predict molecular and functional aspects of cardiotoxicity. Our platform can discriminate between the different cardiotoxic mechanisms of existing and novel anthracyclines Doxorubicin (DOXO), Aclarubicin (ACLA) and Amrubicin (AMR). DOXO and ACLA unlike AMR substantially affected the transcriptome, mitochondrial membrane integrity, contractile force and transcription factor availability. Cardiomyocytes recovered fully within two or three weeks, corresponding to the intermittent clinical treatment regimen. Our system permits the study of hPSC-cardiomyocyte recovery and the effects of accumulated dose after multiple dosing, allowing individualized cardiotoxicity evaluation, which effects millions of cancer patients treated with anthracyclines annually.
Project description:Cardiotoxicity remains a major cause of drug withdrawal, partially due to lacking predictability of animal models. Additionally, risk of cardiotoxicity following treatment of cancer patients is treatment limiting. It is unclear which patients will develop heart failure following therapy. Human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes present an unlimited cell source and may offer individualized solutions to this problem. We developed a platform to predict molecular and functional aspects of cardiotoxicity. Our platform can discriminate between the different cardiotoxic mechanisms of existing and novel anthracyclines Doxorubicin, Aclarubicin, and Amrubicin. Doxorubicin and Aclarubicin unlike Amrubicin substantially affected the transcriptome, mitochondrial membrane integrity, contractile force and transcription factor availability. Cardiomyocytes recovered fully within two or three weeks, corresponding to the intermittent clinical treatment regimen. Our system permits the study of hPSC-cardiomyocyte recovery and the effects of accumulated dose after multiple dosing, allowing individualized cardiotoxicity evaluation, which effects millions of cancer patients treated annually.
Project description:Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), despite efficacy as anti-cancer therapies, are associated with cardiovascular side effects ranging from induced arrhythmias to heart failure. We have utilized patient-specific human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs), generated from 11 healthy individuals and 2 patients receiving cancer treatment, to screen FDA-approved TKIs for cardiotoxicities by measuring alterations in cardiomyocyte viability, contractility, electrophysiology, calcium handling, and signaling. With these data, we generated a “cardiac safety index” to assess cardiotoxicities of existing TKIs. Many TKIs with a low cardiac safety index exhibit cardiotoxicity in patients. We also derived endothelial cells (hiPSC-ECs) and cardiac fibroblasts (hiPSC-CFs) to examine cell type-specific cardiotoxicities. Using high-throughput screening, we determined that VEGFR2/PDGFR-inhibiting TKIs caused cardiotoxicity in hiPSC-CMs, hiPSC-ECs, and hiPSC-CFs. Using phosphoprotein analysis, we determined that VEGFR2/PDGFR-inhibiting TKIs led to a compensatory increase in cardioprotective insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF) signaling in hiPSC-CMs. Activating cardioprotective signaling with exogenous insulin or IGF1 improved hiPSC-CM viability during co-treatment with cardiotoxic VEGFR2/PDGFR-inhibiting TKIs. Thus, hiPSC-CMs can be used to screen for cardiovascular toxicities associated with anti-cancer TKIs, correlating with clinical phenotypes. This approach provides unexpected insights, as illustrated by our finding that toxicity can be alleviated via cardioprotective insulin/IGF signaling.
Project description:Improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer has revealed the long-term side effects of chemotherapeutics, particularly cardiotoxicity. Current clinical measures to track cardiotoxicity are insufficient to diagnose damage before it has been done, necessitating new, early biomarkers of cardiotoxicity. Here, we collected paired transcriptomics and metabolomics data characterizing in vitro cardiotoxicity to three compounds: 5-fluorouracil, acetaminophen, and doxorubicin. Standard gene enrichment and metabolomics approaches identify some commonly affected pathways and metabolites but are not able to readily identify mechanisms of cardiotoxicity. Here, we integrate this paired data with a genome-scale metabolic network reconstruction (GENRE) of the heart to identify shifted metabolic functions, unique metabolic reactions, and changes in flux in metabolic reactions in response to these compounds. Using this approach, we are able to confirm known mechanisms of doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity and provide hypotheses for mechanisms of cardiotoxicity for 5-fluorouracil and acetaminophen.
Project description:The source of most errors in RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) read alignment is in the repetitive structure of the genome and not with the alignment algorithm. Genetic variation away from the reference sequence exacerbates this problem causing reads to be assigned to the wrong location. We developed a method, implemented as the software package Seqnature, to construct the imputed genomes of individuals (individualized genomes) of experimental model organisms including inbred mouse strains and genetically unique outbred animals. Alignment to individualized genomes increases read mapping accuracy and improves transcript abundance estimates. In an application to expression QTL mapping, this approach corrected erroneous linkages and unmasked thousands of hidden associations. Individualized genomes accounting for genetic variation will be useful for human short-read sequencing and other sequencing applications including ChIP-seq.
Project description:Food safety evaluation of new, genetically modified (GM) plant varieties has led to basic questions regarding the safety assessment of new plant varieties and whole foods derived thereof. An important part of the hazard identification in the European approach is a targeted compositional analysis of new GM plant varieties compared to one or more conventional reference varieties. Comparative analysis will become much more informative with unbiased analytical approaches, such as omics profiling. Analysis tools that estimate the similarity of new varieties to the reference would in turn greatly facilitate hazard identification. Further in-depth biological, functional and eventually toxicological analysis of the data would then only be necessary for varieties that fall outside the scale of those with a history of safe human consumption. For this purpose, the use of a one-class classifier tool was explored in this study to assess and classify transcriptome profiles of potato varieties. Five potato varieties were grown in the Netherlands during the same year (NL samples) and included four biological replicates for four varieties or two biological replicates for the fifth one. They were all analysed in 2011. A sixth variety was grown in the UK in a previous study and a previous year, for which the data are submitted in E-MTAB-605. The two UK samples were analysed in the original study in 2008 and again together with the NL samples in the present study, resulting in four profiles for two samples.
Project description:The use of tubulin binders (TBs) in oncology indications often is associated with cardiotoxicity, the mechanism of which has not been elucidated. We observed that a single administration of TBs to rats caused an increase in the number of mitotic figures in the myocardial interstitium after 24 hours. We therefore hypothesized that interstitial cells are the primary target of TBs. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the acute effects of a single intravenous administration of 3 reference TBs, colchicine (0.2 and 2 mg/kg), vinblastine (0.5 and 3 mg/kg), and vincristine (0.1 and 1 mg/kg) 6 and 24 hours after dosing. Mitotic arrest was identified at 24 hours in all high-dose groups based on an increase in the number of mitotic figures in the interstitium coupled with a dramatic decrease in the number of Ki67-positive interstitial cells. Analysis of the myocardial transcriptomic data further supported G2/M cell cycle arrest 6 hours after dosing with the high-dose groups of all 3 compounds. Apoptotic figures and an increase in the number of cleaved caspase 3-positive cells were identified at 6 and 24 hours at the highest dose of each compound almost exclusively in interstitial cells; a few cardiomyocytes were affected as well. Transcriptomic data further suggested that some of the affected interstitial cells were endothelial cells based on the up-regulation of genes typically associated with vascular damage and down-regulation of Endothelial Cell-Specific Molecule 1 and Apelin. Taken together, these data identify endothelial cells of the myocardium as the primary target of the cardiotoxicity of TBs and identify cell cycle arrest as the mechanism of this toxicity. Gene expression was profiled in the myocardium of rats at 6 and 24 hr after a single dose of colchicine, vinblastine or vincristine.