www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/ Oncotarget, 2017, Vol. 8, (No. 57), pp: 96865-96884 Research Paper EGR1 regulates cellular metabolism and survival in endocrine resistant breast cancer Ayesha N. Shajahan-Haq1, Simina M. Boca1,2,3,*, Lu Jin1,*, Krithika Bhuvaneshwar1,2,*, Yuriy Gusev1,2, Amrita K. Cheema1, Diane D. Demas1, Kristopher S. Raghavan1, Ryan Michalek4, Subha Madhavan1,2 and Robert Clarke1 1Department of Oncology, Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA 2Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI), Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA 3Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA 4Metabolon, Inc, Durham, NC, USA *These authors contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Ayesha N. Shajahan-Haq, email:
[email protected] Keywords: breast cancer, endocrine resistance, transcriptomics, metabolomics Received: October 26, 2016 Accepted: May 17, 2017 Published: May 30, 2017 Copyright: Shajahan-Haq et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT About 70% of all breast cancers are estrogen receptor alpha positive (ER+; ESR1). Many are treated with antiestrogens. Unfortunately, de novo and acquired resistance to antiestrogens is common but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Since growth of cancer cells is dependent on adequate energy and metabolites, the metabolomic profile of endocrine resistant breast cancers likely contains features that are deterministic of cell fate. Thus, we integrated data from metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses of ER+ MCF7-derived breast cancer cells that are antiestrogen sensitive (LCC1) or resistant (LCC9) that resulted in a gene-metabolite network associated with EGR1 (early growth response 1).