Therapeutic relevance of the protein phosphatase 2A in cancer

Chromosomal Instability (CIN) is regarded as a unifying feature of heterogeneous tumor populations, driving intratumoral heterogeneity. Polo-Like Kinase 1 (PLK1), a serine-threonine kinase that is often overexpressed across multiple tumor types, is one of the key regulators of CIN and is considered as a potential therapeutic target. However, targeting PLK1 has remained a challenge due to the off-target effects caused by the inhibition of other members of the polo-like family. Here we use synthetic dosage lethality (SDL), where the overexpression of PLK1 is lethal only when another, normally non-lethal, mutation or deletion is present. Rather than directly inhibiting PLK1, we found that inhibition of PP2A causes selective lethality to PLK1-overexpressing breast, pancreatic, ovarian, glioblastoma, and prostate cancer cells. As PP2A is widely regarded as a tumor suppressor, we resorted to gene expression datasets from cancer patients to functionally dissect its therapeutic relevance. We identified two major classes of PP2A subunits that negatively correlated with each other. Interestingly, most mitotic regulators, including PLK1, exhibited SDL interactions with only one class of PP2A subunits (PPP2R1A, PPP2R2D, PPP2R3B, PPP2R5B and PPP2R5D). Validation studies and other functional cell-based assays showed that inhibition of PPP2R5D affects both levels of phospho-Rb as well as sister chromatid cohesion in PLK1-overexpressing cells. Finally, analysis of clinical data revealed that patients with high expression of mitotic regulators and low expression of Class I subunits of PP2A improved survival. Overall, these observations point to a context-dependent role of PP2A that warrants further exploration for therapeutic benefits.