Friday, April 4, 2025
4/4/2025
Mechanisms driving muscle wasting and adipose tissue loss in the UBF mKO mouse - Project Summary/Abstract Skeletal muscle mass loss during cancer cachexia is one of the most important predictors of poor prognosis and mortality among cancer patients. However, the role played by skeletal muscle mass in the survival of cancer patients has been understood as a mere symptom of poor overall body health. Contrary to this notion, recent studies have demonstrated that skeletal muscle has an independent and active role in improving survival among cancer patients. Proof-of-principle investigations have shown that promoting skeletal muscle mass, for instance by blocking myostatin signaling, can increase lifespan in tumor-bearing mice independently of any effect of the drug on tumor volume. Therefore, understanding the mechanism regulating muscle size can lead to better therapeutic targets to improve health outcomes among advanced cancer patients. Ribosome biogenesis, the de novo synthesis of ribosomes, is a key process determining protein synthesis in skeletal muscle. While there has been great attention recently to the roles of muscle ribosome biogenesis in regulating muscle hypertrophy, the roles of muscle ribosome biogenesis to maintain muscle mass and during muscle atrophy are largely unknown. We have generated a mouse strain in which we can lower ribosome biogenesis specifically and conditionally in skeletal muscle. We crossed the Upstream Binding Factor (UBF, a key transcriptional factor important for ribosomal DNA transcriptional) floxed mouse to the muscle specific human α-skeletal actin (HSA) promoter linked to a CRE recombinase (HSA-MCM). Using this mouse model to reduce UBF levels in adult muscles only (which we termed UBF mKO), we showed impairing muscle ribosome biogenesis causes muscle atrophy particularly in type IIb and IIx myofibers, while Type I and IIa fibers are not affected. Unexpectedly, long-term experiments using the UBF mKO mice demonstrated that impaired muscle ribosome biogenesis have severe consequences to muscle and whole-body metabolism that phenocopied cancer cachexia, including high respiratory exchange ratio (RER) and depletion of adipose tissue. With our reversed engineered mouse model, we were able to recreate cancer cachexia from within muscle, challenging the assumption that skeletal muscle wasting in cancer cachexia is a mere effect of systemic disease. Rather, our preliminary data strongly suggest that cachexia in the whole body can be initiated in skeletal muscle. This proposal seeks to investigate the mechanism of muscle wasting via skeletal muscle and to identify the mechanism leading to overall cachectic phenotype. If our hypothesis is correct, this will be the first evidence that muscle wasting in cachexia can be recreated from within the muscle tissue and that muscle ribosome biogenesis could be a target to mitigate or even abolish cancer cachexia altogether.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).