Abstract
Jared Anthony Crasto1,*, Mitchell Stephen Fourman1,*, Alejandro Morales-Restrepo1, Adel Mahjoub1,2, Jonathan Brendan Mandell1, Kavita Ramnath1,3, Jessica C. Tebbets1, Rebecca J. Watters1,4 and Kurt Richard Weiss1,5
1Musculoskeletal Oncology Laboratory, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
3Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
4Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology, University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA
5Departments of Anatomic Pathology and General Surgical Oncology, University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA
*Co-first authors: These authors contributed equally to this work
Correspondence to:
Kurt Richard Weiss, email: WeisKR@UPMC.edu
Keywords: osteosarcoma; disulfiram; bad; Akt; aldehyde dehydrogenase
Abbreviations: OS: osteosarcoma; DSF: disulfiram; DXR: doxorubicin; ALDH: aldehyde dehydrogenase; ICG: indocyanine green
Received: April 17, 2018 Accepted: June 14, 2018 Published: July 10, 2018
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The overall survival rate of patients with osteosarcoma (OS) and pulmonary metastases has remained stagnant at 15–30% for several decades. Disulfiram (DSF) is an FDA-approved aldehyde dehydrogenase inhibitor that reduces the metastatic phenotype of OS cells in vitro. Here we evaluate its in vivo efficacy, as compared to doxorubicin chemotherapy, in a previously-validated orthotopic model of metastatic OS.
Results: All treatment groups displayed a significantly reduced quantitative OS metastatic burden compared with controls. The metastatic burden of Lo DSF-treated animals was equivalent to the DXR group. Ninety-five percent of control animals displayed evidence of metastatic disease, which was significantly greater than all treatment groups.
Discussion: Disulfiram treatment resulted in a reduced burden of OS metastatic disease compared with controls. This was statistically-equivalent to doxorubicin. No additive effect was observed between these two therapies.
Materials and Methods: One-hundred twenty immunocompetent Balb/c mice received proximal tibia paraphyseal injections of 5 × 105 K7M2 murine OS cells. Therapy began three weeks after injection: saline (control), low-dose disulfiram (Lo DSF), high-dose disulfiram (Hi DSF), doxorubicin (DXR), Lo DSF + DXR, and Hi DSF + DXR. Transfemoral amputations were performed at 4 weeks. Quantitative metastatic tumor burden was measured using near-infrared indocyanine green (ICG) angiography.