Barak Rotblat

Mitochondria—critical metabolic hubs in eukaryotic cells—are involved in a wide range of cellular functions, including differentiation, proliferation, and death. Mitochondria import most of their proteins from the cytosol in a linear form, after which they are folded by mitochondrial chaperones. However, despite extensive research, the extent to which the function of particular chaperones is essential for maintaining specific mitochondrial and cellular functions remains unknown. In particular, it is not known whether mitochondrial chaperones influence the sensitivity to drugs used in the treatment of cancers. By mining gene expression and drug sensitivity data for cancer cell lines from publicly available databases, we identified mitochondrial chaperones whose expression is associated with sensitivity to oncology drugs targeting particular cellular pathways in a cancer-type-dependent manner. Importantly, we found the expression of TRAP1 and HSPD1 to be associated with sensitivity to inhibitors of DNA replication and mitosis. We confirmed experimentally that the expression of HSPD1 is associated with an increased sensitivity of ovarian cancer cells to drugs targeting mitosis and a reduced sensitivity to drugs promoting apoptosis. Taken together, our results support a model in which particular mitochondrial pathways hinge upon specific mitochondrial chaperones and provide the basis for understanding selectivity in mitochondrial chaperone-substrate specificity.