Oral Presentation 8th Venoms to Drugs 2023

The senolytic properties of animal venoms (#43)

Javier Moral-Sanz 1 , Isabel Fernandez-Carrasco 1 , Valentina Romponi 2 , Pablo Cabezas-Sainz 3 , Laura E. Sanchez 3 , Gonzalo Colmenarejo 1 , Manuel A. Fernandez Rojo 1 4 , Manuel Serrano 2 5 , Maria P. Ikonomopoulou 1 4
  1. Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Food, Madrid, MADRID, Spain
  2. Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain
  3. University of Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, Spain
  4. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  5. Altos Labs, Cambridge Institute of Science, Granta Park, Cambridge, UK

The success of chemotherapy could be jeopardised by the appearance of senescence in the tumor microenvironment. Transiently, senescence acts as a barrier to tumour progression but persistent accumulation drives pathological inflammation and tumour relapse. A novel and promising therapeutic intervention could be to combine conventional anti-cancer treatments with senolytic agents. In a new research line for our group, we investigated the application of animal venoms and venom-derivatives as “senotherapies”, a new class of senolytics and thus a novel therapeutic approach in cancer. We identified a toxin with senolytic properties (aka venom-senolytic). Our venom-senolytic, along with its optimised analogue, showcased selectivity towards various senescent cancer cells chemically induced by diverse senescence-stimuli. The observed selectivity was mediated by specific lipid-interactions in senescent cancer cells. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that the venom-senolytic induced a marked potassium efflux, which hyperpolarized the plasma membrane of senescent cells. Metabolic examination further revealed a sustained decrease in mitochondrial respiration, which was accompanied by mitochondrial depolarization and cell death. Multi-omics analysis highlighted the impact of our venom-senolytics in metabolism and cancer signalling, including on lipid pathways with structural and inflammatory roles. The modified venom-senolytic strongly synergized with the CDK4/6 inhibitor palbociclib for remission of solid tumours in both mice and zebrafish xenograft melanoma models. Our findings, introduce “senotoxins”: a novel class of potent senolytic agents with promising potential in cancer therapy.