Insights into immuno-oncology drug development landscape with focus on bone metastasis.

Bone is among the main sites of metastasis in breast, prostate and other major cancers. Bone metastases remain incurable causing high mortality, severe skeletal-related effects and decreased quality of life. Despite the success of immunotherapies in oncology, no immunotherapies are approved for bone metastasis and no clear benefit has been observed with approved immunotherapies in treatment of bone metastatic disease.

Enhanced ouabain resistance gene as a eukaryotic selection marker.

Current selection markers allow selection by antibiotics or fluorescent/magnetic sorting by green fluorescent protein or membrane antigens. Antibiotic selection proceeds on a time scale of weeks, and flourescence-activated cell sorting requires complex equipment and may generate false-positive results when selection is performed too early after transduction with membrane markers. We have characterized an endogenous eukaryotic selection marker, the ouabain resistance gene (Oua(r)), which has the potential for quick and efficient in vitro selection of target cells.

Changes in Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase activity influence cell attachment to fibronectin.

Most vital cellular functions are dependent on a fine-tuned regulation of intracellular ion homeostasis. Here we have demonstrated, using COS cells that were untransfected or transfected with wild-type rat ouabain-resistant Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase, that partial inhibition of Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase has a dramatic influence on cell attachment to fibronectin. Ouabain dose-dependently decreased attachment in untransfected cells and in cells expressing wild-type Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase, but not in cells expressing ouabain-insensitive Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase, whereas inhibition of Na(+)-K(+)-ATPase by lowering extracellular K(+) concentration decreased attachment in all three cell types.