Autophagy inhibition is a potential therapeutic strategy in cancer, but it is unknown which tumors will benefit. The BRAFV600E mutation has been identified as important in pediatric CNS tumors and is known to affect autophagy in other tumor types. We evaluated CNS tumor cells with BRAFV600E and found that mutant cells (but not wild type) display high rates of induced autophagy, are sensitive to pharmacologic and genetic autophagy inhibition, and display synergy when the clinically used autophagy inhibitor chloroquine was combined with the Raf inhibitor vemurafenib or standard chemotherapeutics. Importantly we also demonstrate chloroquine can improve vemurafenib sensitivity in a resistant ex vivo primary culture and provide the first demonstration in a patient harboring the V600E mutation treated with vemurafenib that addition of chloroquine can improve clinical outcomes. These findings suggest CNS tumors with BRAFV600E are autophagy-dependent and should be targeted with autophagy inhibition in combination with other therapeutic strategies.

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BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Enterovirus D68 was responsible for widespread outbreaks of respiratory illness throughout the United States in August and September 2014. During this time, several patients presented to our institution with acute flaccid paralysis and cranial nerve dysfunction. The purpose of this report is to describe the unique imaging findings of this neurologic syndrome occurring during an enterovirus D68 outbreak.

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Kinase inhibitors are effective cancer therapies, but tumors frequently develop resistance. Current strategies to circumvent resistance target the same or parallel pathways. We report here that targeting a completely different process, autophagy, can overcome multiple BRAF inhibitor resistance mechanisms in brain tumors. BRAFV600Emutations occur in many pediatric brain tumors. We previously reported that these tumors are autophagy-dependent and a patient was successfully treated with the autophagy inhibitor chloroquine after failure of the BRAFV600E inhibitor vemurafenib, suggesting autophagy inhibition overcame the kinase inhibitor resistance. We tested this hypothesis in vemurafenib-resistant brain tumors. Genetic and pharmacological autophagy inhibition overcame molecularly distinct resistance mechanisms, inhibited tumor cell growth, and increased cell death. Patients with resistance had favorable clinical responses when chloroquine was added to vemurafenib. This provides a fundamentally different strategy to circumvent multiple mechanisms of kinase inhibitor resistance that could be rapidly tested in clinical trials in patients with BRAFV600E brain tumors.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19671.001