Coordinated Splicing of Regulatory Detained Introns within Oncogenic Transcripts Creates an Exploitable Vulnerability in Malignant Glioma

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a devastating malignancy with few therapeutic options. We identify PRMT5 in an in vivo GBM shRNA screen and show that PRMT5 knockdown or inhibition potently suppresses in vivo GBM tumors, including patient-derived xenografts. Pathway analysis implicates splicing in cellular PRM...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Braun, Christian J., Stanciu, Monica, Boutz, Paul L., Patterson, Jesse C., Calligaris, David, Higuchi, Fumi, Neupane, Rachit, Fenoglio, Silvia, Cahill, Daniel P., Wakimoto, Hiroaki, Agar, Nathalie Y.R., Yaffe, Michael B., Sharp, Phillip A., Hemann, Michael T., Lees, Jacqueline A., Boutz, Paul, Patterson, Jesse C, Yaffe, Michael B, Hemann, Michael, Lees, Jacqueline, Braun, Christian Joerg
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Format: Article
Published: Elsevier BV 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118828
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5229-8748
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7221-6041
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0788-3136
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1951-7803
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2598-0098
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9547-3251
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1465-1691
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9451-2194
Description
Summary:Glioblastoma (GBM) is a devastating malignancy with few therapeutic options. We identify PRMT5 in an in vivo GBM shRNA screen and show that PRMT5 knockdown or inhibition potently suppresses in vivo GBM tumors, including patient-derived xenografts. Pathway analysis implicates splicing in cellular PRMT5 dependency, and we identify a biomarker that predicts sensitivity to PRMT5 inhibition. We find that PRMT5 deficiency primarily disrupts the removal of detained introns (DIs). This impaired DI splicing affects proliferation genes, whose downregulation coincides with cell cycle defects, senescence and/or apoptosis. We further show that DI programs are evolutionarily conserved and operate during neurogenesis, suggesting that they represent a physiological regulatory mechanism. Collectively, these findings reveal a PRMT5-regulated DI-splicing program as an exploitable cancer vulnerability. Braun et al. show that glioblastoma is selectively sensitive to the inhibition of PRMT5 and identify a predictive biomarker for this sensitivity. PRMT5 inhibition primarily disrupts the removal of detained introns, which results in the reduction of functional transcripts of mainly proliferation-associated genes. Keywords: splicing addiction; GBM; PRMT5; EPZ015666; biomarker; CLNS1A; RIOK1