Inhibition of IKKβ/NF-κB signaling pathway to improve Dasatinib efficacy in suppression of cisplatin-resistant head and neck squamous cell carcinoma

Proto-oncogene tyrosine-protein kinase Src plays an important role in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC). However, the FDA-approved SRC inhibitor Dasatinib shows very limited efficacy in HNSCC clinical trials, even though Dasatinib can completely inhibit SRC in the laboratory setting. These results suggest that SRC inhibition can cause compensatory up-regulation and/or activation of other survival pathways, which suggests that co-targeting of SRC and the potential signaling pathways may improve the Dasatinib efficacy. In this study, we investigated the role of IKKβ/NF-κB in regulation of the sensitivity of cisplatin-resistant HNSCC to Dasatinib. Additionally, we wished to determine whether inhibition of the IKKβ/NF-κB signaling pathway could enhance Dasatinib efficacy to inhibit cisplatin-resistant HNSCC without the use of cisplatin. Previous studies have shown that ETS-1 is a crucial SRC effector protein that regulates cancer cell proliferation, anti-apoptosis, and metastasis. We found that SRC kinase inhibition by Dasatinib decreased ETS-1 expression but caused elevation of IKKβ/NF-κB signaling in multiple cisplatin-resistant HNSCC. Interestingly, inhibition of IKKβ/NF-κB by CmpdA (Bay65-1942), a recently identified IKKβ inhibitor, also led to a decrease in ETS-1 levels. Moreover, the knockdown of IKK, but not NF-κB, dramatically decreased ETS-1 expression. In addition, IKKβ and ETS-1 interacted in cisplatin-resistant HNSCC. These data demonstrated cross-talk between SRC and IKK to regulate NF-κB and ETS-1. Furthermore, we found that simultaneous inhibition of SRC and IKKβ through a Dasatinib and CmpdA combination synergistically inhibited NF-κB activation and ETS-1expression, suppressed cell proliferation, and induced apoptosis. Taken together, our data indicate that SRC and IKKβ play crucial roles in cisplatin-resistant HNSCCC and co-targeting SRC and IKKβ could be an effective strategy to treat cisplatin-resistant HNSCC.