Ovarian cancer cell cluster inhibits pancreatic cancer progression

Abstract Pancreatic cancer is the most lethal cancer and all of the current cancer treatment strategies fail at this disease. It is thus urgently important to explore novel therapeutics. We previously revealed that it can be significantly inhibited by ovarian cancer cell by both in vitro and in vivo experiments. It was reported that cancer cell cluster can greatly enhance the efficiency in metastasis model compared to single cancer cell. Given this observation, here we proposed that ovarian cancer cell cluster could inhibit pancreatic cancer more efficiently than single ovarian cancer cell. As a result, animal experiments demonstrated that the injection of both low and high doses of SKOV3 ovarian cancer cluster show significantly higher efficiency in inhibiting pancreatic cancer xenografts than single SKOV3 ovarian cancer cell. Moreover, single cell RNA-sequencing analysis revealed that ovarian cancer cell cluster treatment inhibited pancreatic cancer by promoting inflammation response by both activating the NF-κB pathway in pancreatic cancer cells and substantially shifting macrophages in tumor microenvironments (TME) to M1 phenotype. In summary, this study proposed and validated a novel potential therapeutic for pancreatic cancer. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.