Small cell lung cancer is a type of highly aggressive lung cancer. As it typically causes symptoms in early-stage patients, it can be discovered at earlier stages, therefore, chemotherapy drugs are usually implemented almost throughout the entire course of treatment, causing more chance for the cells to develop MDR [37]. Clinical cancer treatment involves many drugs that might potentially make a difference such as anesthetics [39–42]. The doses of chemotherapy are critical for the treatment of SCLC. In this study, we conducted a series of CCK-8 assays to determine the effective doses of five commonly used chemo agents including cisplatin, etoposide, paclitexal, epirubicin, and irinotecan with H446 and H446/EP. The CCK-8 assay was a simple-step cell viability assay with stable results [43] and has fewer steps than the MTT assay [31, 44] [45]. Thus CCK-8 was conducive for our serious viability assay. The evaluation of IC50 and DRIC revealed that H446/EP showed MDR property. In this study, we studied one of the typical chemotherapy drugs cisplatin using the H446/EP model. H446/EP is a wildly used resistance cell line that was reported a lot previously [29, 38]. On one hand, this enables us to generate the cell line stably. On the other, this makes our results easier to compare with others' results. In addition, in the clinical cancer treatment, patients who develop multi-drug resistance are a much more difficult situation than specific cisplatin-resistant, if multi-drug resistance has a different mechanism compared to specific cisplatin-resistant, it is more valuable to study multi-drug resistance. When eliminating multi-drug resistance, it does not necessarily need to eliminate the resistance of cancer to all drugs, improving the sensitivity of cancer to one drug would be beneficial. Therefore, as for a higher clinical value, we study the cisplatin-resistant in multi-drug resistance model.
Many previous studies have reported that cisplatin can induce MDR in H446 cells through multiple pathways [46, 47]. Our results demonstrated that the drug resistance to cisplatin was resulted (at least partly) from the insensitivity of autophagy induction. Accumulating literature reported that abnormal autophagy plays a critical role in cancer MDR development [48]. Nevertheless, to date, few researchers are studying the inhibition of autophagy in drug-resistant lung cancer cells. In the present study, we demonstrated that autophagy was involved in H446/EP, and the potential mechanism included the activation of LC3I/LC3II conversion, ATG5 expression, and p62 expression. LC3II conversed from LC3I has been wildly accepted to be associated with the movement of mature autophagosomes along microtubular tracks [49], while ATG5 has been one of the indicators for autophagy and it plays essential roles in the elongation and expansion of phagophore membrane. The downregulation of ATG5 could prevent the autophagosome from maturation and thereby block autophagy [50]. The p62 protein, also named SQSTM1, is involved in various signaling pathways and cellular functions including autophagy [51]. The p62 is a multifunctional protein in autophagy. The binding of p62 directly to LC3 via a short LC3 interaction region is one of the most critical mechanisms to deliver selective autophagic cargo for the bioprocess. The p62 overexpression increases the aggregation of ubiquitinated proteins and has a protective effect on cell survival, while p62 decrease results in some diseases by damaging autophagic degradation. However, the p62 protein itself is degraded by autophagy and can accumulate when the autophagy level is reduced. Therefore, on one hand, p62 is upstream of autophagy. On the other hand, p62 is degraded by autophagy. Normally, the accumulation of p62 means decreased activity of autophagy, but in our study, we also observed the other two indicators for autophagy: ATG5 and LC3. Increased level of ATG5 and LC3II means an increase in autophagy. Under the effect of cisplatin, ATG5 and LC3 indicated that the autophagy was increased, but in our results, the p62 was also increased. We suggested that this was because the cisplatin remarkably up-regulated p62 but did not affect ATG5 and LC3II. Only p62 contributed to the increase in autophagy, but not ATG5 and LC3. Thus, the remarkably up-regulated p62 was not degraded fast enough by autophagy, and hence p62 accumulated. In addition, the drug resistance triggered the MiR-199a-5p/p62 axis. The p62 in resistance cells was very low, therefore, cells became insensitive to cisplatin.
Growing lines of evidence supported the abnormal expression of miR-199a-5p in MDR cell lines. A study showed that cisplatin-induced the decrease of miR-199a-5p expression in human osteosarcoma cells MG63 [52]. Another study reported that the expression of miR-199a-5p in leukemia cells from relapsed/refractory patients was lower than that from patients with complete remission [53]. However, our results showed that H446/EP expressed a higher level of miR-199a-5p. But the miR-199a-5p expression was not induced by short-time exposure of cisplatin. We suggested that the reaction of miR-199a-5p expression to cisplatin was cancer-type specific. In the KD experiment of H446, KD was not strong, we think it might be because the level of MiR-199a-5p in H446 was already low before KD and can not be further decreased. On the other hand, in H446/EP, KD reduced miR-199a-5p by 70%, we think this was because in H446/EP was higher than in H446, thus miR-199a-5p can be decreased. Another striking finding of this study was that miR-199a-5p could directly bind to p62 mRNA resulting in the degradation of p62 in autophagy repressive H446/EP cells. The regulation of p62-mediated autophagy by MiR-199a-5p was found to be a potential mechanism of small cell lung cancer cisplatin resistance. In addition, the ATG5 protein was also critical in the regulations of autophagy. Although ATG5 was involved in the MDR of H446, our data suggested that it is not affected by miR-199a-5p.
Our study was the first paper that reported an abnormally high expression of miR-199a-5p in drug resistance lung cancer cells. This study is conducive to the development of miR-199a-5p as a potential biomarker for the occurrence of drug resistance in lung cancer cells. Our data suggested that miR-199a-5p could be a pharmacological target for p62 protein and it was critical in mediating autophagy regulation by cisplatin. In addition, sodium homeostasis has been suggested to be involved in autophagy, but whether the role of sodium channels in cancer [54] is associated with autophagy, cisplatin, and MDR needs further investment. Many studies identified cancer biomarkers[55]. We think miR-199a-5p can also be a potential cancer biomarker. In addition, so far, it is still controversial that autophagy is a protective or responsive mechanism upon each treatment, the same thing here for cisplatin on small cell lung cancer. It is important to link autophagy degrees with cell growth rate, apoptosis et al. or, it could very much be possible, autophagy is just an independent event that has nothing to do with cell growth rate and apoptosis. However, we think autophagy is not the only mechanism of drug resistance. As we do not want to over-interpret the results, our data only suggested that autophagy might be associated with cell viability and we are sure that autophagy is altered during the resistance.
Another aspect that can be further explored is the potential regulation of miR-199a-5p by natural drugs. In recent years, many naturally occurring compounds have been studied and implemented in the clinical therapy of human disease [56–60]. Accumulating evidence suggests that chemotherapy supplied by traditional medicine can achieve desirable outcomes in clinical cancer treatment, including higher efficiency and lower side effects [61, 62]. For example, the natural compound β-elemene has been shown to induce autophagy in cancer cells [63], at the same time, it can suppress the multidrug-resistant cell lines [64]. We believe that autophagy is one of the mechanisms of these multidrug-resistant effects. A better understanding of autophagy in multidrug-resistant cancer cells can provide evidence for the use of some of these pharmacological active compounds.