Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC) From Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: Study of BCR-ABL Addiction and Effect of Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors,

Abstract 3754

The tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) such as imatinib, by suppressing BCR-ABL oncogene activity, are an effective therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia disease (CML). However, the majority of patients achieving remission with TKI continue have molecular evidence of persistent disease. In addition, we have reported that for patients who achieved a sustained complete molecular remission, 60% of them relapse after discontinuation of imatinib. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain disease persistence and disease recurrence. One of the hypotheses is that primitive leukemic stem cells can survive in the presence of TKI. Little is known about the stem cells survival due to technical difficulties (small and poorly defined primary populations). Understanding the mechanisms by which these cells survive to TKI therapy will be critical to devising strategy aimed to their elimination. We propose to generate iPSC derived from CD34⁺ blood cells isolated from CML patient (CML-iPSC), as a model for study leukemic stem cells survival in the presence of TKI and study the mechanism of TKI resistance of the stem cells.

Primary CD34⁺ CML patient cells were transduced by 2 excisable lentiviral vectors (both flanked by two LoxP sites), one expressing three reprogramming factors (OCT4-SOX2-KLF4) and another one with c-MYC and a shRNA against TP53. Twenty-one days after co-transduction, CML-iPSC colonies were picked and five iPS clones were characterized (expression of pluripotency markers by RT-PCR (DPPA4, NANOG, CRIPTO) and immunofluorescence (NANOG, SSEA-4, TRA1-60)). Efficiency of reprogrammation was low compared to cord blood CD34+ control cells (0.01% vs 0.1%, respectively), and delayed (21 days vs 14 days). Philadelphia chromosome (Ph) positive was observed in 4/5 clones after cytogenetic analysis. Expression of BCR-ABL (Western-blot and RT-PCR) was present at various levels. Interestingly, 1/5 clone was generated from non-leukemic cell (Ph negative) and was used as internal control for the following function assays. We used these 5 CML-iPSC clones to study their behavior in presence of TKI. All CML-iPSC clones survived to escalating concentration of imatinib (0 to 20μM) and ponatinib (0 to 50nM) for 6 days. To understand if the CML-iPSC survival was due to resistance or independence mechanisms, we performed western blot analysis of TKI targets. BCR-ABL activity was inhibited under TKI exposure (dephosphorylations of BCR/ABL and of Crkl). In order to check whether survival was due to the expression of reprogramming factors, we excised the gene cassettes by an Adenovirus expressing CRE recombinase. After proviral excision and subcloning, excised CML-iPSC continued to survive to TKI exposure. Taken together, these results demonstrate that CML-iPSC survival do not depend on BCR-ABL (oncogene independence). Upon induction of hematopoietic differentiation, CML-iPSC were able to efficiently generate progenitors of hematopoietic lineages (up to 40% of CD45⁺) and colony forming units in methylcellulose. TKI effect on iPSC-derived hematopoietic progenitors, to analyze the putative recovery of TKI sensibility compared to primitive CML blood cells from the same patient, are in progress.

We conclude that reprogrammation of CD34^BCR-ABL+ cells from CML patient is possible and that CML-iPSC lost the BCR-ABL dependency and became resistant to TKI. A specific differentiated epigenetic cell state is probably needed to maintain BCR-ABL dependency. CML-iPSC can be used to study mechanisms by which leukemic stem cells survive to TKI therapy and is a promising tool for testing and screening new therapeutic target reducing leukemic stem cell survival.