Preprint
Article

Calcitriol Promotes Differentiation of Glioma Stem-Like Cells and Increases their Susceptibility to Temozolomide

Altmetrics

Downloads

396

Views

340

Comments

0

A peer-reviewed article of this preprint also exists.

Submitted:

27 June 2021

Posted:

29 June 2021

You are already at the latest version

Alerts
Abstract
: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and most aggressive primary brain tumor with a very high rate of recurrence and a median survival of 15 months after diagnosis. Abundant evi-dence suggests that a certain sub-population of cancer cells harbors a stem-like phenotype and is likely responsible for disease recurrence, treatment resistance and potentially even for the infil-trative growth of GBM. GBM incidence has been negatively correlated with the serum levels of 25-hydroxy-vitamin D3, while the low pH within tumors has been shown to promote the ex-pression of the vitamin D3-degrading enzyme 24-hydroxylase, encoded by the CYP24A1 gene. Therefore, we hypothesized that calcitriol can specifically target stem-like glioblastoma cells and induce their differentiation. Here, we show using in vitro limiting dilution assays, quantita-tive real-time PCR and ex vivo adult organotypic brain slice transplantation cultures that thera-peutic doses of calcitriol, the hormonally active form of vitamin D3, reduces stemness to varying extent in a panel of investigated GSC lines and effectively hinders tumor growth of responding GSCs ex vivo. We further show that calcitriol synergizes with Temozolomide ex vivo to com-pletely eliminate some GSC tumors. These findings indicate that calcitriol carries potential as an adjuvant therapy for a subgroup of GBM patients and should be analyzed in more detail in fol-low-up studies.
Keywords: 
Subject: Biology and Life Sciences  -   Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
Prerpints.org logo

Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

Subscribe

© 2024 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated