David A. Quigley

Over one million cases of gastric cancer are diagnosed each year globally, and the metastatic disease continues to have a poor prognosis. A significant proportion of gastric tumors have defects in the DNA damage response pathway, creating therapeutic opportunities through synthetic lethal approaches. Several small-molecule inhibitors of ATR, a key regulator of the DNA damage response, are now in clinical development as targeted agents for gastric cancer. Here, we performed a large-scale CRISPR interference screen to discover genetic determinants of response and resistance to ATR inhibitors (ATRi) in gastric cancer cells. Among the top hits identified as mediators of ATRi response were UPF2 and other components of the nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) pathway. Loss of UPF2 caused ATRi resistance across multiple gastric cancer cell lines. Global proteomic, phosphoproteomic, and transcriptional profiling experiments revealed that cell-cycle progression and DNA damage responses were altered in UPF2-mutant cells. Further studies demonstrated that UPF2-depleted cells failed to accumulate in G1 following treatment with ATRi. UPF2 loss also reduced transcription–replication collisions, which has previously been associated with ATRi response, thereby suggesting a possible mechanism of resistance. Our results uncover a novel role for NMD factors in modulating response to ATRi in gastric cancer, highlighting a previously unknown mechanism of resistance that may inform the clinical use of these drugs. Significance: Loss of NMD proteins promotes resistance to ATR inhibitors in gastric cancer cells, which may provide a combination of therapeutic targets and biomarkers to improve the clinical utility of these drugs.