To assess their etiologic role, we examined the association of 70 tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in seven IGF-1 and three IL-6 pathway genes with multiple myeloma risk in two prospective cohorts, the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.
In the search of an in vitro a model with molecular features similar to relapsing lesions, we focused our attention on an IL-6 autocrine human myeloma cell line (U266), characterized by apoptosis resistance due to upregulation of two constitutive signaling pathways: NFkappaB and STAT-3.
Treatment of IL-6-dependent and IL-6-independent multiple myeloma cell lines with CNTO 328 enhanced the cytotoxicity of bortezomib in a sequence-dependent fashion.
The IL-6 response of KAS-6/1 myeloma also raises a question of whether the proneoplastic growth factor, such as IL-6, supports the epigenetic silencing of important DNA repair genes via promoter hypermethylation during the development of multiple myeloma.
Conversely, stimulation with IL-6 enhanced bFGF expression and secretion by myeloma cell lines (2-fold; P =.02) as well as MM patient cells (up to 3.6-fold; median, 1.5-fold; P =.002).
Analysis of the transcriptional activity of 5'-regulatory sequences from the human Mcl-1 gene in MM cells demonstrated high levels of IL-6-independent indicator gene activation as predicted.
Importantly, VX-745 inhibits both MM cell proliferation and IL-6 secretion in BMSCs triggered by adherence of MM cells to BMSCs, suggesting that it can inhibit paracrine MM cell growth in the BM milieu and overcome cell adhesion-related drug resistance.
To clarify the mechanism of PBDC deficiency in MM, we investigated the effects of the main plasma cell growth factor, interleukin-6 (IL-6), on the development of DCs from CD34(+) cells.