Mutation and functional analysis of PIK3CA and PIK3R1 in endometrial cancer

Abstract

The phosphatidylinositol 3 kinase (PI3K) pathway is the most frequently activated pathway across multiple tumor lineages and this is a potential therapeutic target. As a critical step to accelerate therapeutic development in endometrial cancer, we performed a comprehensive analysis of mutation and function of PI3K pathway members in a set of 243 highly characterized endometrial tumors. Whole gene resequencing revealed the highest frequencies of mutation in the PI3K pathway of any tumor lineage including PTEN (44%), PIK3CA (40%; encoding the p110α catalytic subunit of PI3K) and PIK3R1 (20%; encoding the p85a regulatory subunit). Indeed, when complete protein loss is considered, almost 80% of endometrioid endometrial cancers demonstrate an aberration in the PI3K pathway. Remarkably, mutations in the PI3K pathway were not mutually exclusive and indeed co-existence of PIK3CA or PIK3R1 mutation with heterozygous PTEN mutation occurred at frequencies higher than predicted by the frequency of each lesion alone. High-throughput reverse-phase protein array suggested that the dominant signaling effects occurred with PTEN protein loss and that PIK3CA or PIK3R1 mutation functionally mimic PTEN protein loss as indicated by protein markers including phosphorylated Akt and stathmin. Thus it appears likely that co-mutations in the PI3K pathway are selected to compensate haploinsufficiency of PTEN due to PTEN heterozygous mutation. To determine the functional consequences of mutations in PIK3R1, we demonstrated that several somatic PIK3R1 mutations tested conferred cytokine-independent growth on interleukin-3-dependent Ba/F3 cells and induced Akt phosphorylation in endometrial cancer cell lines indicating that they were gain of function mutations likely acting as oncogenes. Strikingly two of the gain of function mutations (E160* and R348*) lacked the ability to bind to the p110 catalytic subunit and E160* failed to bind to both p110 and PTEN. We demonstrate that E160* disrupts a novel mechanism of pathway regulation wherein p85 binds and stabilizes PTEN. Together, the data indicate that the PI3K pathway is targeted in the vast majority of endometrioid endometrial cancers representing a novel opportunity for implementation of targeted therapy.