Fallopian Tube-Derived High-Grade Serous Cancers Influence Ovarian Production of Norepinephrine and Generate Specific Metabolomic Signatures

Abstract

High-grade serous ovarian cancer is the most common and lethal gynecologic malignancy, which is often attributed to the lack of available screenings, allowing the disease to progress unnoticed until it is diagnosed at more aggressive stages. As such, identifying signals in the tumor microenvironment involved in the primary metastasis of tumorigenic fallopian tube epithelial (FTE) cells to the ovary could provide new avenues for prevention, diagnostics, or therapeutic intervention. Since our previous work identified that the interaction of tumorigenic FTE and the ovary causes the release of norepinephrine (NE) from the ovary, we intended to determine the effects of ovarian NE on signaling and invasion of tumorigenic FTE models and high-grade serous ovarian cancer cell lines. We demonstrate that NE does not universally enhance migration, invasion, or adhesion by using multiple cell types but does alter specific oncogenic protein expression in certain models. In vivo, we found that blocking NE signaling via slow-release propranolol pellets significantly increased survival time in mice injected intraperitoneally with murine FTE cells engineered to stably express shRNA for PTEN and an activated KRAS expression construct. Finally, we identified that the metabolome released from the ovary is variable depending upon which cell type it is cocultured with, suggesting that distinct driver mutations in fallopian tube epithelial tumor models and early lesions can alter specific metabolomes within the surrounding ovarian microenvironment. These metabolomes provide the next frontier for evaluating local signals of the tumor microenvironment that facilitate ovarian spread of FTE lesions.