Abstract
Despite recent biomedical improvements in treating Multiple Myeloma (MM), the disease still remains incurable. Toll like receptors (TLRs) provide a link between innate and adaptive immune responses and hence potentially correlate inflammation to cancer. Although the regulatory role of TLRs in MM has been under investigation the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. In this study we assayed the function of TLR4 in MM cell lines and in MM patients' samples. We found that lipopolysaccharide-mediated TLR4 activation increased MM cells proliferation and decreased endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress-induced apoptosis. Furthermore, we observed that either the endogenous CHOP expression or the ER stress-mediated CHOP induction, were suppressed by TLR4 activation or its overexpression in MM cell lines; TLR4 induction also suppressed ER stress-induced apoptotic signals. In support, TLR4 gene expression silencing in MM cell lines significantly decreased cell proliferation and promoted CHOP and ATF4 upregulation. TLR4 activation was also able to partially abrogate the effect of bortezomib in MM cell lines by suppressing PERK, ATF4 and phospho-eIF2A. We suggest that TLR4-mediated disruption of ER stress responses contributes to MM cells proliferation and suppresses ER-dependent death signals.