Lactate Upregulates the Expression of DNA Repair Genes, Causing Intrinsic Resistance of Cancer Cells to Cisplatin

Intrinsic or acquired drug resistance is one of the major problems compromising the success of antineoplastic treatments. Several evidences correlated some therapeutic failures with changes in cell metabolic asset and in line with these findings, hindering the glycolytic metabolism of cancer cells via lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) inhibition was found to overcome the resistance to chemotherapeutic agents. Lactate, the product of LDH reaction, was shown to be involved in epigenetic regulation of gene expression. The experiments described in this paper were aimed at highlighting a possible direct effect of lactate in modifying the response of cancer cells to a chemotherapeutic treatment. To discriminate between the effects potentially caused by glycolytic metabolism from those directly referable to lactate, we selected cancer cell lines able to grow in glucose deprived conditions and evaluated the impact of lactate on the cellular response to cisplatin-induced DNA damage. In lactate-exposed cells we observed a reduced efficacy of cisplatin, which was associated with reduced signatures of DNA damage, enhanced DNA recombination competence and increased expression of a panel of genes involved in DNA repair. The identified genes take part in mismatch and nucleotide excision repair pathways, which were found to contribute in restoring the cisplatin-induced DNA damage. The obtained results suggest that this metabolite could play a role in reducing the efficacy of antineoplastic treatments.