Chronic High-Salt Diet Activates Tumor-Initiating Stem Cells Leading to Breast Cancer Proliferation

Several chronic inflammatory diseases have been linked to high-salt (HS) diets. Chronic inflammation is an established causative hallmark of cancer. However, a direct role of HS diets in tumorigenesis is yet to be defined. Previous orthotopic murine breast tumor studies have shown that short-term HS diets caused inhibition of tumor growth through the activation of cytotoxic adaptive immune responses. However, there have been experimental challenges in developing a viable chronic HS-diet-based murine tumor model. To address this, we have developed a novel chronic HS diet tumor model through the sequential passaging of tumor cells in mice under HS dietary conditions. Two orthotopic murine triple-negative breast cancer models, 4T1 tumor cells injected into BALB/c mice and Py230 tumor cells injected into C57Bl/6 mice, were utilized in our study. For the HS diet cohort, prior to orthotopic injection with tumor cells, the mice were kept on a 4% NaCl diet for 2 weeks. For the regular salt (RS) diet cohort, the mice were kept on a 1% NaCl diet. Following syngeneic cancer cell injection, tumors were allowed to grow for 28 days, following which they were collected to isolate immune cell-depleted cancer cells (passage 1, P1). The tumor cells from P1 were reinjected into the next set of non-tumor-bearing mice. This procedure was repeated for three cycles (P2–P4). In P1, compared to the RS diet cohort, we observed reduced tumor kinetics in both murine tumor models on the HS diet. In contrast, by P4, there was significantly higher tumor progression in the HS diet cohort over the RS diet cohort. Flow cytometry analysis demonstrated an 8-fold increase in tumor-initiating stem cells (TISCs) from P1 to P4 of the HS diet cohort, while there were no significant change in TISC frequency with sequential passaging in the RS diet cohort. Molecular studies showed enhanced expression of TGFβR2 and CD80 on TISCs isolated from the P4 HS diet cohort. In vitro studies demonstrated that TGFβ stimulation of these TISCs increased the cellular expression of CD80 molecules. Further, the chronic HS diet selectively induced the glycolytic metabolic phenotype over the mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation phenotype in TISCs, which is needed for the production of metabolites during tumor cell differentiation and proliferation. The infiltrating CD8 and CD4 T-lymphocytes in P4 tumors demonstrated increased expression of the immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) CTLA4, a known binding partner of CD80, to cause immune exhaustion and pro-tumorigenic effects. Interestingly, anti-TGFβ monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) played a synergistic role in further enhancing the anti-tumor effect of anti-CTLA4 mAb. In summary, our findings demonstrated that chronic HS diet increased the frequency of TISCs in tumors leading to blunting of cytotoxic adaptive immune responses causing tumor proliferation. Furthermore, a combination of anti-TGFβ with current ICI-based immunotherapies could exert more favorable anti-cancer clinical outcomes.