Inhibition of IL-6-JAK/Stat3 signaling in castration-resistant prostate cancer cells enhances the NK cell-mediated cytotoxicity via alteration of PD-L1/NKG2D ligand levels

To investigate whether IL-6 signaling affects the susceptibility of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) cells to cytotoxic action of natural killer (NK) cells, CRPC cell lines (having different IL-6 levels) were developed by lentiviral transduction. While observing no secreted IL-6 level in parental C4-2 and CWR22Rv1 cells, we found the IL-6 expression/secretion in these cells was induced after the transduction process and the IL-6 level difference in C4-2siIL-6/sc and CWR22siIL-6/sc cell CRPC cell sets could be detected. We then found that IL-6-knockdown cells were more susceptible to NK cell cytotoxicity than control cells due to lowered programmed death receptor ligand 1 (PD-L1) and increased NK group 2D (NKG2D) ligand levels. In animal studies, to concur with the invitro results, we found that IL-6-expressing cell-derived tumors were more resistant to NK cell action than the tumors of IL-6-knockdown cells. Further, we discovered that JAK-Stat3 is the most critical IL-6 downstream signaling that modulates PD-L1/NKG2D ligand levels in CRPC cells. Furthermore, inhibition of the JAK or Stat3 signaling effectively increased the susceptibility of C4-2sc and CWRsc cells to NK cell cytotoxicity. We observed the most effective cytotoxicity when the PD-L1 Ab and JAK inhibitor (or Stat 3 inhibitor) were used together. These results suggest that the strategy of targeting IL-6 signaling (or its downstream signaling) may enhance the NK cell-mediated immune action to CRPC tumors, thus yielding clinical implications in developing future immunotherapeutics of exploiting this strategy to treat patients with CRPC.