Calcium channel blockers potentiate gemcitabine chemotherapy in pancreatic cancer

There is currently no effective treatment for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). While palliative chemotherapy offers a survival benefit to most patients, nearly all will eventually progress on treatment and long-term survivability remains poor. Given the lack of subsequent line treatment options, in this study, we sought to identify novel strategies to prevent, delay, or overcome resistance to gemcitabine, one of the most widely used medications in PDAC. Using a combination of single-cell RNA sequencing and high-throughput proteomic analysis, we identified a subset of gemcitabine-resistant tumor cells enriched for calcium/calmodulin signaling. Pharmacologic inhibition of calcium-dependent calmodulin activation led to the rapid loss of drug-resistant pheno-types in vitro, which additional single-cell RNA sequencing identified was due to impaired activation of the RAS/ERK signaling pathway. Consistent with these observa-tions, calcium chelation or depletion of calcium in the culture media also impaired ERK activation in gemcitabine-resistant cells, and restored therapeutic responses to gemcita-bine in vitro. We observed similar results using calcium channel blockers (CCBs) such as amlodipine, which inhibited prosurvival ERK signaling in vitro and markedly enhanced therapeutic responses to gemcitabine in both orthotopic xenografts and transgenic mod-els of PDAC. Combined, these results offer insight into a potential means of gemcita-bine resistance and suggest that select CCBs may provide a clinical benefit to PDAC patients receiving gemcitabine-based chemotherapy.

Automated summary

There is currently no effective treatment for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). In this study, researchers identified a subset of gemcitabine-resistant tumor cells enriched for calcium/calmodulin signaling. Inhibition of calcium-dependent calmodulin activation led to the loss of drug-resistant phenotypes, and calcium chelation or depletion impaired ERK activation and restored therapeutic responses to gemcitabine. Calcium channel blockers also enhanced therapeutic responses to gemcitabine.