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

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. 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