Broad-Spectrum Therapeutic Suppression of Metastatic Melanoma Through Nuclear Hormone Receptor Activation. Homo sapiens

Melanoma metastasis is a devastating outcome in need of novel preventive therapies. We provide pharmacologic, nolecuar, and genetic evidence establishing the liver-X nuclear hormone receptor (LXR) as a therapeutic target in melanoma. Molecular and genetic experiments revealed these effects to be mediated by LXRb, which elicits these outcomes through transcriptional induction of tumoral and systemic apolipoprotein-E (ApoE). LXRb agonism robustly suppressed tumor growth and metastasis across a wide spectrum of melanoma lines of diverse mutational subtypes established in xenograft, immunocompetent, and genetically-initiated model. We propose a path for the clinical testing of LXRb targeting-a therapeutic approach that uniquely acts by transcriptionally acivating a metastasis suppressor gene. Overall design: In this experiment we analyzed the effect of GW3965 treatment on gene expression in the MeWo human melanoma cell line. The cells were treated either with DMSO or GW3965 at 1 micromolar for 48 hours, after which the RNA was extracted and gene expression was analyzed by transcriptomic profiling