Functional Characterization of Genes Driving Enhanced Biological Aggressiveness of Myeloma Cells: Identification of Novel and Understudied "Drivers" of Myeloma

Loss-of-function (LOF) studies (e.g. using RNAi or CRISPR) have historically been the main functional approaches to identify and study genes which drive the biology of Multiple Myeloma(MM) or other neoplasias. We hypothesized though that substantial complementary data can be derived from systematically examining the impact of transcriptional activation of endogenous genomic loci of different genes. To perform such gain-of-function (GOF) studies in an open-ended genome-scale manner, we applied CRISPR activation approaches in 4 MM lines (MM1S, KMS11, LP1, L363) which were transduced with the dCas9-P65-HSF transcriptional activation system and the Calabrese genome-scale sgRNA library (2 pooled sub-libraries; total of ~110,000 sgRNAs targeting promoters of ~18000 genes; initial coverage ~800-1000 cells/sgRNA). Next generation sequencing quantified the sgRNA abundance in MM cells at baseline and various time points (e.g. 2-12 weeks of culture), and rank aggregation algorithms identified genes with statistically significant enrichment or depletion of their sgRNAs, reflecting positive vs. negative, respectively, effects of GOF of these genes on MM cell survival/proliferation. These studies identified distinct groups of genes which serve as positive regulators of MM cell growth in at least 3 of the cell lines tested, including critical transcription factors (TFs)/cofactors, such as POU2F2, POU2AF1, IRF4, MYC; growth factor signaling mediators, such as IGF1R and IRS1; Ras family members (e.g. KRAS in MM1S cells); diverse members of the solute carrier family of transporters for amino acids and other bioactive small molecules. We also observed positive regulators of MM cell growth with distinct roles in certain cell lines, e.g. induction of IKZF3, IKZF1, RELA, CD48, MBNL1, PAX2 exhibited significantly more pronounced role as positive regulators of MM1S cells compared to the other cell lines tested. Notably, several positive regulators of MM growth identified in these CRISPR activation studies are not essential for MM cell survival/proliferation in CRISPR knockout studies in the same MM cell lines or many others. Examples of such genes include the TFs POU2F2 (Oct2) and PAX2, the TRAF interacting protein TIFA or the Toll-like receptor TLR4. We went on to validate these results for several such genes (e.g. POU2F2, POU2AF1) with individual sgRNAs for CRISPR activation and/or cDNA overexpression (vs. isogenic controls) in competition experiments and cell cycle analyses. We focused on further probing the mechanistic basis for the role of POU2AF1 as one of the top positive regulators of MM cell growth and performed RNA sequencing analyses of LP1 cells harboring induction of POU2AF1 expression using CRISPR activation. We observed upregulation of a distinct cluster of >50 genes that are themselves positive regulators of LP1 cell growth in our genome-scale CRISPR activation studies. While some of these are known drivers of tumor cell growth (e.g. AURKB, E2F1, FGFR3), the large majority of these POU2AF1-driven positive regulators of MM cell growth have not been previously studied in MM; and exhibit a distinct enrichment for transcriptional regulators and other genes which are not required for LP1 cell survival/proliferation in CRISPR KO studies of LP1 cells. These results indicate that CRISPR-based activation of endogenous gene expression provides data which complementary to those derived from CRISPR LOF studies. Indeed, we not only validated through our GOF studies the relevance of genes which with prominent essentiality in CRISPR LOF studies (e.g. IRF4, POU2AF1, etc.), but also identified promising new candidate regulators of MM cell biology which are not essential for baseline survival/growth of MM cells, but can induce MM cell growth when further activated. These results provide novel insights into the biology of MM cells and may have therapeutic implications towards suppressing the ability of MM cells to transition to states of advanced biological aggressiveness.