Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in adult patients is often resistant to current therapy, making the development of novel therapeutic agents paramount. We investigated whether mTOR inhibitors (MTIs), a class of signal transduction inhibitors, would be effective in primary human ALL. Lymphoblasts from adult patients with precursor B ALL were cultured on bone marrow stroma and were treated with CCI-779, a second generation MTI. Treated cells showed a dramatic decrease in cell proliferation and an increase in apoptotic cells, compared to untreated cells. We also assessed the effect of CCI-779 in a NOD/SCID xenograft model. We treated a total of 68 mice generated from the same patient samples with CCI-779 after establishment of disease. Animals treated with CCI-779 showed a decrease in peripheralblood blasts and in splenomegaly. In dramatic contrast, untreated animals continued to show expansion of human ALL. We performed immunoblots to validate the inhibition of the mTOR signaling intermediate phospho-S6 in human ALL, finding down-regulation of this target in xenografted human ALL exposed to CCI-779. We conclude that MTIs can inhibit the growth of adult human ALL and deserve close examination as therapeutic agents against a disease that is often not curable with current therapy.
IntroductionWhile children with precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) are often cured, children with relapsed ALL and adults with ALL usually succumb to their disease with current therapy. Even with aggressive therapy, these patient groups have 5-year diseasefree survival rates of only 28% to 39%. 1 Thus, the development of novel therapeutic agents is crucial.One potential class of novel therapeutics is mTOR inhibitors (MTIs). MTIs are a class of signal transduction inhibitors with anticancer activity that were initially developed as immunosuppressive agents. [2][3][4][5] Rapamycin, a macrocyclic lactone produced by Streptomyces hydroscopicus, 6 was the first MTI to be used in a clinical setting. Rapamycin is well tolerated in humans. 7 MTIs also have been shown to be active against a wide variety of tumor types. [8][9][10] We have previously shown that rapamycin induces apoptosis in precursor B ALL lines in vitro and has in vivo activity in transgenic mice with pre-B leukemia/lymphoma. 11 Second generation MTIs, CCI-779 and RAD-001, are currently in phase 1 to phase 3 clinical trials in patients with various cancers, 12-15 but preclinical studies have not previously been performed in primary human ALL.Preclinical testing of chemotherapeutic agents often involves using transformed tumor lines and transgenic mouse models. While these are valuable tools, they may not be representative of human disease. More clinically relevant data may be obtained from systems using primary human ALL cells. Two of these systems, bone marrow stroma-supported culture 16 and xenografting human ALL in nonobese diabetic/severe combined immunodeficient (NOD/ SCID) mice, have recently been developed. 17 Both of these systems allow for direct testing...