Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a promising target for treating cancer, yet how CSC plasticity is maintained in vivo is unclear and is difficult to study in vitro. Here we establish a sustainable primary culture of Oct3/4( þ )/Nanog( þ ) lung CSCs fed with CD90( þ ) cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) to further advance our knowledge of preserving stem cells in the tumour microenvironment. Using transcriptomics we identify the paracrine network by which CAFs enrich CSCs through de-differentiation and reacquisition of stem cell-like properties. Specifically, we find that IGF1R signalling activation in cancer cells in the presence of CAFs expressing IGF-II can induce Nanog expression and promote stemness. Moreover, this paracrine signalling predicts overall and relapse-free survival in stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. IGF-II/IGF1R signalling blockade inhibits Nanog expression and attenuates cancer stem cell features. Our data demonstrate that CAFs constitute a supporting niche for cancer stemness, and targeting this paracrine signalling may present a new therapeutic strategy for NSCLC.

The results showed that the TUG and the DGI have generally acceptable random measurement error and test-retest reliability. These findings should help clinicians and researchers determine whether a change in an individual patient with PD is a true change.

A potential mechanism of acquired resistance to osimertinib in patients with T790M is through the BRAF pathway. Simultaneous blockade of the BRAF and EGFR had a significant inhibitory effect.

No abstract

Besides being building blocks for protein synthesis, amino acids serve a wide variety of cellular functions, including acting as metabolic intermediates for ATP generation and for redox homeostasis. Upon amino acid deprivation, free uncharged tRNAs trigger GCN2-ATF4 to mediate the well-characterized transcriptional amino acid response (AAR). However, it is not clear whether the deprivation of different individual amino acids triggers identical or distinct AARs. Here, we characterized the global transcriptional response upon deprivation of one amino acid at a time. With the exception of glycine, which was not required for the proliferation of MCF7 cells, we found that the deprivation of most amino acids triggered a shared transcriptional response that included the activation of ATF4, p53 and TXNIP. However, there was also significant heterogeneity among different individual AARs. The most dramatic transcriptional response was triggered by methionine deprivation, which activated an extensive and unique response in different cell types. We uncovered that the specific methionine-deprived transcriptional response required creatine biosynthesis. This dependency on creatine biosynthesis was caused by the consumption of S-Adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM) during creatine biosynthesis that helps to deplete SAM under methionine deprivation and reduces histone methylations. As such, the simultaneous deprivation of methionine and sources of creatine biosynthesis (either arginine or glycine) abolished the reduction of histone methylation and the methionine-specific transcriptional response. Arginine-derived ornithine was also required for the complete induction of the methionine-deprived specific gene response. Collectively, our data identify a previously unknown set of heterogeneous amino acid responses and reveal a distinct methionine-deprived transcriptional response that results from the crosstalk of arginine, glycine and methionine metabolism via arginine/glycine-dependent creatine biosynthesis.