Genome-Wide CRISPR Screen Reveals the Synthetic Lethality between BCL2L1 Inhibition and Radiotherapy

Authors

Ling Yin
Xiaoding Hu
Guangsheng Pei
Mengfan Tang
You Zhou
Huimin Zhang
Min Huang
Siting Li
Jie Zhang
Citu Citu
Zhongming Zhao
Bisrat G Debeb
Xu Feng
Junjie Chen

Publication Date

4-1-2024

Journal

Life Science Alliance

Abstract

Radiation therapy (RT) is one of the most commonly used anticancer therapies. However, the landscape of cellular response to irradiation, especially to a single high-dose irradiation, remains largely unknown. In this study, we performed a whole-genome CRISPR loss-of-function screen and revealed temporal inherent and acquired responses to RT. Specifically, we found that loss of the IL1R1 pathway led to cellular resistance to RT. This is in part because of the involvement of radiation-induced IL1R1-dependent transcriptional regulation, which relies on the NF-κB pathway. Moreover, the mitochondrial anti-apoptotic pathway, particularly the BCL2L1 gene, is crucially important for cell survival after radiation. BCL2L1 inhibition combined with RT dramatically impeded tumor growth in several breast cancer cell lines and syngeneic models. Taken together, our results suggest that the combination of an apoptosis inhibitor such as a BCL2L1 inhibitor with RT may represent a promising anticancer strategy for solid cancers including breast cancer.

Keywords

Female, Humans, bcl-X Protein, Breast Neoplasms, Cell Line, Tumor, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, NF-kappa B, Synthetic Lethal Mutations

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Supplementary Materials

PMID: 38316463