Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most aggressive and lethal malignancies. Development of the chemoresistance in the PDAC is one of the key contributors to the poor survival outcomes and the major reason for urgent development of novel pharmacological approaches in a treatment of PDAC. Systematically tailored combination therapy holds the promise for advancing the treatment of PDAC. However, the number of possible combinations of pharmacological agents is too large to be explored experimentally. In respect to the many epigenetic alterations in PDAC, epigenetic drugs including histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) could be seen as the game changers especially in combined therapy settings. In this work, we explored a possibility of using drug-sensitivity data together with the basal gene expression of pancreatic cell lines to predict combinatorial options available for HDACi. Developed bioinformatics screening protocol for predictions of synergistic drug combinations in PDAC identified the sphingolipid signaling pathway with associated downstream effectors as a promising novel targets for future development of multi-target therapeutics or combined therapy with HDACi. Through the experimental validation, we have characterized novel synergism between HDACi and a Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) inhibitor RKI-1447, and between HDACi and a sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) receptor agonist fingolimod.
Keywords: HDAC inhibitors; PDAC; ROCK inhibitors; bioinformatics; sphingolipid signaling; synergism.