Year 3

This grant focuses on generation of myeloproliferative disorder or neoplasm (MPN) stem cells from pluripotent human embryonic stem cells (hESC) or multipotent cord blood (CB) stem cells, and seeks to correlate their leukemic potential with that of disease progression in MPN patient sample-derived stem cells. In the first and second years of this grant, we found that lentiviral BCR-ABL transduced hESC-derived CD34+ cells had higher leukemic transplantation potential than chronic phase (CP) chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) progenitors. However, they sustained self-renewal only when co-transduced with lentiviral beta-catenin suggesting that blast crisis (BC) evolution requires acquisition of both enhanced survival and self-renewal potential. Similarly, we have shown using lentiviral vectors that mouse and human mutant JAK2 were insufficient to produce self-renewing MPN stem cells. New results in Year 3 demonstrate that BCR-ABL and JAK2 activation drive differentiation of hematopoietic progenitors towards an erthyroid/myeloid lineage bias. We have used full transcriptome RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) technology to evaluate the genetic and epigenetic status of BCR-ABL and JAK2-transduced normal progenitor cells as well as patient-derived MPN progenitors. This has allowed us to probe the mechanisms of aberrant differentiation and self-renewal of MPN progenitors and identify unique gene expression signatures of disease progression.

We previously found that overexpression and splice isoform switching of a key RNA editing enzyme – adenosine deaminase acting on dsRNA (ADAR), and splice isoform changes in pro-survival BCL2 family members, correspond with disease progression in CML. In the current reporting period, RNA-Seq analyses revealed that ADAR1-driven activation of RNA editing contributed to malignant progenitor reprogramming, promoting aberrant differentiation and self-renewal of MPN stem cells. Knocking down ADAR1 using lentiviral shRNA vectors reduced the self-renewal potential of CML progenitors. This work has culminated in a manuscript that has now been submitted to PNAS (Jiang et al.). Recent results also show that ADAR1 is activated in progenitors from patients with JAK2-driven MPNs. Thus, ADAR1 may be an important factor that works in concert with BCR-ABL or JAK2 to facilitate disease progression in MPNs.

Our results show that another self-renewal factor that may drive BCR-ABL or JAK2-mediated propagation of disease from quiescent MPN progenitors is Sonic hedgehog (Shh). We have examined the expression patterns of this pathway in MPN progenitors using qRT-PCR and RNA-Seq, and have tested a pharmacological inhibitor of this pathway in a robust stromal co-culture model of MPN progression to Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML).

In sum, we have utilized full transcriptome RNA-Seq and qRT-PCR coupled with hematopoietic progenitor assays and in vivo studies to evaluate the impact of JAK2 versus BCR-ABL on stem cell fate, survival, self-renewal and dormancy. These techniques have allowed us to investigate in more detail the role of genetic and epigenetic alterations that drive disease progression in the context of specific malignant microenvironments, and the relative susceptibility of MPN stem cells in these niches to single agent molecularly targeted inhibitors.