A perspective analysis: microRNAs, glucose metabolism, and drug resistance in colon cancer stem cells

Metabolism sustains the stemness of Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs), affecting, in turn, tumor heterogeneity, metastatic potential, and therapy resistance. Therefore, it is appealing to target CSCs metabolism as a new therapeutic approach. Consequently, we paid considerable attention to the anti-apoptotic microRNA miR-483-3p, that we reported being regulated by glucose metabolism in liver cancer cells. We investigated the therapeutic potential of targeting miR-483-3p by using the anti-glucose metabolism 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) molecule in tumor Xenograft mouse model originating from two different Colon-Cancer Stem Cell lines (CCSC lines). We show that 2-DG treatment does not affect CCSCs during tumor formation in immunocompromised mouse models despite its ability to increase the CCSCs apoptotic rate in vitro and decrease miR-483-3p expression in both in vitro and in vivo experimental conditions. The promising in vitro data contrast with in vivo results that show the inefficacy of the treatment. We think that, in our immuno-compromised mouse model, to inhibit the glucose metabolism could become not only ineffective but also counterproductive by creating a selective pressure on the most fitting tumoral clones.