NK92 cells and peripheral blood NK cells respond oppositely upon dasatinib treatment

Natural Killer (NK) cell is a valuable tool for immunotherapy in cancer treatment, both the cultured cell line NK92 and primary NK cells are widely studied and used in the research and clinical trials. Clinical observations witnessed the improvement of patients’ NK cells in terms of cell counts and cytotoxic activity upon dasatinib treatment, an approved drug against CML and Ph+ ALL. Several studies supported the clinical observations, yet others argued a detrimental effect of dasatinib on NK cells. Due to the complex conditions in different studies, the definite influence of dasatinib on NK92 and primary NK cells remains to be settled. Here, we used a well-defined in vitro system to evaluate the effects of dasatinib on NK92 cells and peripheral blood (PB)-NK cells. By coculturing NK cells with dasatinib to test the cell counts and target cell killing activities, we surprisingly found that the chemical influenced oppositely on these two types of NK cells. While dasatinib suppressed NK92 cell proliferation and cytotoxic activity, it improved PB-NK killing tumor cells. RNA-seq analysis further supported this finding, uncovering several proliferating and cytotoxic pathways were responding invertedly between them. Our results highlighted an intrinsic difference between NK92 and PB-NK cells and may build clues to understand how dasatinib interacts with NK cells in vivo. To explore the functional effects of dasatinib on PBNK and NK92 NK cells, we treated two cells at a concentration of 50 nM for three days, extracted total RNA, and performed RNAseq analysis in both cells compared to DMSO