OGDHL Promotes Prostate Cancer Progression and Regulates Neuroendocrine Marker Expression and Nucleotide Abundance

As cancer cells evade therapeutic pressure and adopt alternate lineage identities not commonly observed in the tissue of origin, they likely adopt alternative metabolic programs to support their evolving demands. Targeting these alternative metabolic programs in distinct molecular subtypes of aggressive prostate cancer may lead to new therapeutic approaches to combat treatment resistance. We identify the poorly studied metabolic enzyme oxoglutarate dehydrogenase-like (OGDHL), named for its structural similarity to the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle enzyme oxoglutarate dehydrogenase, as an unexpected regulator of tumor growth, treatment-induced lineage plasticity, and DNA damage in prostate cancer. Although OGDHL has been described as a tumor suppressor in various cancers, we find that its loss impairs prostate cancer cell proliferation and tumor formation. Loss of OGDHL reduces nucleotide synthesis, induces accumulation of the DNA damage response marker γH2AX, and alters androgen receptor inhibition-induced plasticity. Our data suggest that OGDHL has minimal impact on TCA cycle activity and that mitochondrial localization is not required for its regulation of nucleotide metabolism. Finally, we demonstrate that OGDHL expression is tightly correlated with neuroendocrine (NE) differentiation in clinical prostate cancer and that knockdown of OGDHL impairs the growth of cell line models of NE prostate cancer. These findings underscore the importance of investigating poorly characterized metabolic genes as potential regulators of distinct molecular subtypes of aggressive cancer.

OGDHL emerged as an unexpected metabolic dependency associated with lineage plasticity and NE differentiation, implicating poorly studied metabolic enzymes as potential targets for treatment-resistant prostate cancer.