TGF-β induced reprogramming and drug resistance in triple-negative breast cells

BACKGROUND: The development of drug resistance remains to be a major cause of therapeutic failure in breast cancer patients. How drug-sensitive cells first evade drug inhibition to proliferate remains to be fully investigated. METHODS: Here we characterized the early transcriptional evolution in response to TGF-β in the human triple-negative breast cells through bioinformatical analysis using a published RNA-seq dataset, for which MCF10A cells were treated with 5 ng/ml TGF-β1 for 0 h, 24 h, 48 h and 72 h, and the RNA-seq were performed in biological duplicates. The protein-protein interaction networks of the differentially expressed genes were constructed. KEGG enrichment analysis, cis-regulatory sequence analysis and Kaplan-Meier analysis were also performed to analyze the cellular reprograming induced by TGF-β and its contribution to the survival probability decline of breast cancer patients. RESULT: Transcriptomic analysis revealed that cell growth was severely suppressed by TGF-β in the first 24 h but this anti-proliferate impact attenuated between 48 h and 72 h. The oncogenic actions of TGF-β happened within the same time frame with its anti-proliferative effects. In addition, sustained high expression of several drug resistance markers was observed after TGF-β treatment. We also identified 17 TGF-β induced genes that were highly correlated with the survival probability decline of breast cancer patients. CONCLUSION: Together, TGF-β plays an important role in tumorigenesis and the development of drug resistance, which implies potential therapeutic strategies targeting the early-stage TGF-β signaling activities. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40360-022-00561-x.