Using Nuclear Receptor Activity to Stratify Hepatocarcinogens

BACKGROUND Nuclear receptors (NR) are a superfamily of ligand-activated transcription factors that control a range of cellular processes. Persistent stimulation of some NR is a non-genotoxic mechanism of rodent liver cancer with unclear relevance to humans. Here we report on a systematic analysis of new in vitro human NR activity data on 309 environmental chemicals in relationship to their liver cancer-related chronic outcomes in rodents. RESULTS The effects of 309 environmental chemicals on human constitutive androstane receptors (CAR/NR1I3), pregnane X receptor (PXR/NR1I2), aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPAR/NR1C), liver X receptors (LXR/NR1H), retinoic X receptors (RXR/NR2B) and steroid receptors (SR/NR3) were determined using in vitro data. Hepatic histopathology, observed in rodents after two years of chronic treatment for 171 of the 309 chemicals, was summarized by a cancer lesion progression grade. Chemicals that caused proliferative liver lesions in both rat and mouse were generally more active for the human receptors, relative to the compounds that only affected one rodent species, and these changes were significant for PPAR (p0.001), PXR (p0.01) and CAR (p0.05). Though most chemicals exhibited receptor promiscuity, multivariate analysis clustered them into relatively few NR activity combinations. The human NR activity pattern of chemicals weakly associated with the severity of rodent liver cancer lesion progression (p0.05). CONCLUSIONS The rodent carcinogens had higher in vitro potency for human NR relative to non-carcinogens. Structurally diverse chemicals with similar NR promiscuity patterns weakly associated with the severity of rodent liver cancer progression. While these results do not prove the role of NR activation in human liver cancer, they do have implications for nuclear receptor chemical biology and provide insights into putative toxicity pathways. More importantly, these findings suggest the utility of in vitro assays for stratifying environmental contaminants based on a combination of human bioactivity and rodent toxicity.