DNAR-14. MODULATING POPULATIONAL VARIANCE OF METHYL-GUANINE METHYL TRANSFERASE (MGMT) EXPRESSION THROUGH MICRORNA DEGRADATION: A NOVEL MECHANISM OF TEMOZOLOMIDE RESISTANCE

Abstract O6 methyl-guanine methyltransferase (MGMT) restores alkylated DNA to its undamaged form in a stochiometric manner to prevent the cytotoxic effects of temozolomide (TMZ), a DNA alkylating agent used as a standard-of-care treatment for glioblastomas. We previously demonstrated that he microRNA, miR-181d, post-transcriptionally repressed MGMT expression. Here, we show that treatment of glioblastoma cells with TMZ induced a feed-forward cascade resulting in an ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 (ATR) and polyribonucleotide nucleotidyl transferase 1 (PNPT1)-dependent degradation of miR-181d. Single-cell analyses revealed such miR-181d degradation induced an: 1) increased mean level of MGMT expression and 2) widened the variance in MGMT expression in the cell population. While the former is known to confer increased population fitness to temozolomide, the importance of the latter is unknown. By mixing cultures derived from isogenic glioblastoma subclones with distinct MGMT expression levels, we generated glioblastoma cell populations with comparable mean MGMT expression levels while differing in the populational variance in MGMT expression (classified as “wide” or “narrow”). Despite comparable mean levels of MGMT expression, the glioblastoma population with wide variance exhibited increased temozolomide resistance relative to the population with the narrow variance, in vitro and in vivo. Transfection of miR-181d into the wide-variance population narrows the variance of MGMT expression and restores TMZ sensitivity to levels comparable to that observed in miR-181d transfected narrow-variance populations. These findings suggest that TMZ-induced miR-181d degradation enhanced TMZ resistance through modulation of both the mean and variance of MGMT expression, mechanisms which may be extrapolated to microRNA biology in general.