Author Correction: Nanoparticle conjugates of a highly potent toxin enhance safety and circumvent platinum resistance in ovarian cancer.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Publisher Correction: Nanoparticle conjugates of a highly potent toxin enhance safety and circumvent platinum resistance in ovarian cancer.

The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Yingjie Yu, which was incorrectly given as Yu Yingjie. Furthermore, in Figure 3a, the labels 'MD | p < 0.05' incorrectly read 'MD | p > 0.05'. These errors have now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Nanoparticle conjugates of a highly potent toxin enhance safety and circumvent platinum resistance in ovarian cancer.

Advanced-stage epithelial ovarian cancers are amongst the most difficult to treat tumors and have proven to be refractory to most cytotoxic, molecularly targeted, or immunotherapeutic approaches. Here, we report that nanoparticle-drug conjugates (NDCs) of monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) significantly increase loading on a per-vehicle basis as compared to antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Their intraperitoneal administration enabled triggered release of the active MMAE toxin to inhibit tumor growth and to extend animal survival to >90 days in a cell-line xenograft model of disseminated ovarian cancer. In a patient-derived xenograft model of advanced-stage and platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, an MMAE-based NDC doubled the duration of tumor growth inhibition as compared to cisplatin. NDCs of highly potent toxins thus introduce a translatable platform that may be exploited to maximize the safety and efficacy of cytotoxic chemotherapies, combining the best features of ADCs with those of nanoparticle-based therapeutics.

ATR inhibition disrupts rewired homologous recombination and fork protection pathways in PARP inhibitor-resistant BRCA-deficient cancer cells.

Poly-(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors (PARPis) selectively kill BRCA1/2-deficient cells, but their efficacy in BRCA-deficient patients is limited by drug resistance. Here, we used derived cell lines and cells from patients to investigate how to overcome PARPi resistance. We found that the functions of BRCA1 in homologous recombination (HR) and replication fork protection are sequentially bypassed during the acquisition of PARPi resistance. Despite the lack of BRCA1, PARPi-resistant cells regain RAD51 loading to DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) and stalled replication forks, enabling two distinct mechanisms of PARPi resistance. Compared with BRCA1-proficient cells, PARPi-resistant BRCA1-deficient cells are increasingly dependent on ATR for survival. ATR inhibitors (ATRis) disrupt BRCA1-independent RAD51 loading to DSBs and stalled forks in PARPi-resistant BRCA1-deficient cells, overcoming both resistance mechanisms. In tumor cells derived from patients, ATRis also overcome the bypass of BRCA1/2 in fork protection. Thus, ATR inhibition is a unique strategy to overcome the PARPi resistance of BRCA-deficient cancers.