HSP70 Induces IL-6 in Stromal Cells and Stat-3 Activation in Myeloma Cells.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is characterized by the clonal proliferation of malignant plasma cells that accumulate preferentially in the bone marrow. In spite of high dose chemotherapy and novel targeted therapies this disease remains incurable with a median survival of 3–6 years mainly because of the emergence of drug resistance. Improved survival requires new strategies to prevent relapse. Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are a super family of highly conserved proteins, which are induced in plant, yeast, bacterial and mammalian cells in response to an array of physiological and environmental stress cues. Among heat shock protein families, HSP70 is one of the most highly conserved and is the only protein expressed in response to cellular stress. Exogenous HSP70 has been demonstrated to act as a cytokine to human monocytes by stimulating rapid calcium influx, activating nuclear factor (NF)-kB and up-regulating the expression of IL-1b, IL-6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a) (Asea A et al., 2000). Adhesion of myeloma cells to bone marrow stromal cells mediates IL-6 secretion and tumor cell proliferation in part mediated by STAT-3 activation (Cheung WC et al., 2001). We have shown that adhesion of myeloma cells to bone marrow stromal cells enhances IL-6 secretion by stromal cells and HSP70 secretion by myeloma cells. When we inhibited the HSP70 expression using either KNK437 (HSF-1 inhibitor) or RNAi to HSP70, IL-6 secretion by stromal cells as well as activation of STAT-3 in myeloma cells was inhibited in dose-dependent manner. These results suggest that HSP70 released from myeloma cells is enhancing IL-6 secretion from stromal cells. Incubation of stromal cells with recombinant HSP70 did not enhance IL-6 secretion in stromal cells suggesting that some other soluble factor released from myeloma cells cooperates with HSP70 to enhance IL-6 secretion by stromal cells, We examined whether HSP70 can modulate IL-6 mediated STAT-3 activation by stimulating 8226 cells with IL-6 in the presence or absence of KNK437 and RNAi to HSP70 and measuring phospho-STAT-3 by western analysis. HSP70 inhibition attenuated IL-6 induced STAT-3 activity, but not ERK1/2 activity, indicating that HSP70 mediated IL-6 signaling is very specific to STAT-3. The signal transduction cascade by which HSP70 induces IL-6 secretion and the mechanism by which HSP70 mediates IL-6 induced STAT-3 activity are currently under investigation.