Lentiviral-Driven Discovery of Cancer Drug Resistance Mutations

Identifying resistance mutations in a drug target provides crucial information. Lentiviral transduction creates multiple types of mutations due to the error-prone nature of the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT). Here we optimized and leveraged this property to identify drug resistance mutations, developing a technique we term LentiMutate. This technique was validated by identifying clinically relevant EGFR resistance mutations, then applied to two additional clinical anticancer drugs: imatinib, a BCR-ABL inhibitor, and AMG 510, a KRAS G12C inhibitor. Novel deletions in BCR-ABL1 conferred resistance to imatinib. In KRAS-G12C or wild-type KRAS, point mutations in the AMG 510 binding pocket or oncogenic non-G12C mutations conferred resistance to AMG 510. LentiMutate should prove highly valuable for clinical and preclinical cancer-drug development. SIGNIFICANCE: LentiMutate can evaluate a drug's on-target activity and can nominate resistance mutations before they occur in patients, which could accelerate and refine drug development to increase the survival of patients with cancer.