Abstract
With rising incidence rates, endometrial cancer is one of the most common gynecologic malignancies in the United States. Although surgery provides significant survival benefit to early-stage patients, those with advanced or recurrent metastatic disease have a dismal prognosis. Limited treatment options include chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Hence, there is a compelling need for developing molecularly targeted therapy. Here, we show that the polycomb ring finger protein BMI1, also known as a stem cell factor, is significantly overexpressed in endometrial cancer cell lines, endometrial cancer patient tissues as well as in nonendometrioid histologies and associated with poor overall survival. PTC-028, a second-generation inhibitor of BMI1 function, decreases invasion of endometrial cancer cells and potentiates caspase-dependent apoptosis, while normal cells with minimal expression of BMI1 remain unaffected. In an aggressive uterine carcinosarcoma xenograft model, single-agent PTC-028 significantly delayed tumor growth and increased tumor doubling time compared with the standard carboplatin/paclitaxel therapy. Therefore, anti-BMI1 strategies may represent a promising targeted approach in patients with advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer, a population where treatment options are limited. Mol Cancer Ther; 17(10); 2136-43. ©2018 AACR.