Abstract
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Here we show for the first time that HtrA3 is a mitochondrial stress-response factor that promotes cytotoxicity to etoposide and cisplatin in lung cancer cell lines. Exogenous expression of wild type HtrA3 domain variants significantly attenuated cell survival with etoposide and cisplatin treatment in lung cancer cell lines H157 and A549 compared with expression of protease inactive mutants (S305A) or vector control. Conversely, HtrA3 suppression promoted cell survival with etoposide and cisplatin treatment in lung cancer cell lines Hop62 and HCC827. Survival was attenuated by re-expression of wild type HtrA3 variants during treatment but not by protease inactive mutants or vector control. HtrA3 also co-fractionated and co-localized with mitochondrial markers with both endogenous and exogenous expression in normal lung and lung cancer cell lines but was translocated from mitochondria following etoposide treatment. Moreover, HtrA3 translocation from mitochondria correlated with an increase in cell death that was attenuated by either HtrA3 suppression or Bcl-2 overexpression. Taken together, these results suggest that HtrA3 may be a previously uncharacterized mitochondrial cell death effector whose serine protease function may be crucial to modulating etoposide- and cisplatin-induced cytotoxicity in lung cancer cell lines.