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Drug-repositioning screening identified piperlongumine as a direct STAT3 inhibitor with potent activity against breast cancer

Oncogene volume 34, pages 1341–1353 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) 3 regulates many cardinal features of cancer including cancer cell growth, apoptosis resistance, DNA damage response, metastasis, immune escape, tumor angiogenesis, the Warburg effect and oncogene addiction and has been validated as a drug target for cancer therapy. Several strategies have been used to identify agents that target Stat3 in breast cancer but none has yet entered into clinical use. We used a high-throughput fluorescence microscopy search strategy to identify compounds in a drug-repositioning library (Prestwick library) that block ligand-induced nuclear translocation of Stat3 and identified piperlongumine (PL), a natural product isolated from the fruit of the pepper Piper longum. PL inhibited Stat3 nuclear translocation, inhibited ligand-induced and constitutive Stat3 phosphorylation, and modulated expression of multiple Stat3-regulated genes. Surface plasmon resonance assay revealed that PL directly inhibited binding of Stat3 to its phosphotyrosyl peptide ligand. Phosphoprotein antibody array analysis revealed that PL does not modulate kinases known to activate Stat3 such as Janus kinases, Src kinase family members or receptor tyrosine kinases. PL inhibited anchorage-independent and anchorage-dependent growth of multiple breast cancer cell lines having increased pStat3 or total Stat3, and induced apoptosis. PL also inhibited mammosphere formation by tumor cells from patient-derived xenografts. PL’s antitumorigenic function was causally linked to its Stat3-inhibitory effect. PL was non-toxic in mice up to a dose of 30 mg/kg/day for 14 days and caused regression of breast cancer cell line xenografts in nude mice. Thus, PL represents a promising new agent for rapid entry into the clinic for use in treating breast cancer, as well as other cancers in which Stat3 has a role.

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Acknowledgements

We thank various BCM core facilities for providing the infrastructure, instrumentation and expertise for performing many of our experiments; the Integrated Microscopy core (Director: Michael Mancini, PhD) for assistance with the HTFM screening assay; the Cytometry and Cell Sorting Core (Director: Joel M Sederstrom, MBS/Christine Beeton, PhD) for the Phosphoflow experiments; the Protein and Antibody Array Proteomics Core (Director: Shixia Huang, PhD) for the phosphoproteomic analysis. This project was supported, in part, by the following grants: National Institutes of Health grant CA149783 (DJT), P50-CA058183 (MTL), U54-CA149196 (MTL), the BCM Cancer Center Support Grant P30 CA125123, research grants from the John S Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics Screening Grant Program (DJT), NCRR grant S10RR024574, NIAID AI036211 and NCI P30 CA125123 (BCM Cytometry and Cell Sorting Core funding).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, Section of Infectious Disease, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    U Bharadwaj, T K Eckols, M Kolosov, M M Kasembeli, A Adam, D Torres & D J Tweardy

  2. Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    X Zhang, L E Dobrolecki, W Wei & M T Lewis

  3. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    W Wei, M T Lewis & D J Tweardy

  4. Program in Developmental Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    M T Lewis

  5. Department of Radiology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    M T Lewis & D J Tweardy

  6. The Methodist Cancer Center, The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, Houston, TX, USA

    B Dave, J C Chang & M D Landis

  7. Department of Medicine, Section of Hematology-Oncology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    C J Creighton

  8. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    M A Mancini

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  1. U Bharadwaj
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Correspondence to D J Tweardy.

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Bharadwaj, U., Eckols, T., Kolosov, M. et al. Drug-repositioning screening identified piperlongumine as a direct STAT3 inhibitor with potent activity against breast cancer. Oncogene 34, 1341–1353 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/onc.2014.72

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