Tumor nutrient stress gives rise to a drug tolerant cell state in pancreatic cancer

Abstract

Systemic therapies are the standard of care for most pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients but provide limited benefit due to pervasive resistance. The fibrotic tumor microenvironment (TME) is thought to drive resistance by restricting perfusion and drug delivery. Here, we show that therapeutically relevant drug concentrations are achieved even in poorly perfused, therapy-resistant murine PDAC tumors, indicating that impaired delivery alone does not explain drug resistance. Instead, we find TME exposure imprints a therapy-resistant state upon PDAC cells. These observations raised the question of how the TME imposes this state. Poor perfusion alters nutrient availability in the TME. To model this, we developed Tumor Interstitial Fluid Medium (TIFM), which recapitulates TME nutrient conditions. TIFM cultured PDAC cells acquire a therapy-resistant phenotype that mirrors resistance observed in the TME. In this state, cytotoxic and targeted therapies retain on-target activity but fail to trigger cell death, resulting in therapeutic tolerance. Mechanistically, drug tolerance is driven by suppression of apoptotic priming and can be reversed by inhibition of the anti-apoptotic regulator BCL-XL. These results identify TME-driven reprogramming of cell death as a key mechanism of therapy resistance in PDAC and establish TIFM as a physiologically relevant model for studying microenvironment-induced drug resistance.