Epithelial mesenchymal transition status is associated with anti-cancer responses towards receptor tyrosine-kinase inhibition by dovitinib in human bladder cancer cells.

Background: Dovitinib (TKI-258) is a receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) inhibitor targeting fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) and further related RTKs. TKI-258 is under investigation as anticancer drug for the treatment of various cancers including bladder cancer with aberrant RTK signaling. Here, we analyzed the responses of ten human bladder cancer cell lines towards TKI-258 treatment in relation to the epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) status of the cells.

Methods: Expression of epithelial marker E-cadherin as well as mesenchymal markers N-cadherin and vimentin was determined by quantitative RT-PCR and Western-blot in RNA and protein extracts from the cultured cell lines. The cell responses were analyzed upon addition of TKI-258 by viability/proliferation (XTT assay) and colony formation assay for measurement of cell contact independent growth.

Results: The investigated bladder cancer cell lines turned out to display quite different EMT patterns as indicated by the abundance of E-cadherin or N-cadherin and vimentin. Protein and mRNA levels of the respective components strongly correlated. Based on E-cadherin and N-cadherin mRNA levels that were expressed approximately mutual exclusively, an EMT-score was calculated for each cell line. A high EMT-score indicated mesenchymal-like cells and a low EMT-score epithelial-like cells. Then, we determined the IC₅₀ values for TKI-258 by dose response curves (0-12 μM TKI-258) in XTT assays for each cell line. Also, we measured the clonogenic survival fraction after adding TKI-258 (1 μM) by colony formation assay. We observed significant correlations between EMT-score and IC₅₀ values (r = 0.637, p = 0.0474) and between EMT-score and clonogenic survival fraction (r = 0.635, p = 0.0483) as analyzed by linear regression analyses.

Conclusions: In sum, we demonstrated that the EMT status based on E-cadherin and N-cadherin mRNA levels may be useful to predict responses towards TKI-258 treatment in bladder cancer.