Targeting RAS-driven human cancer cells with antibodies to upregulated and essential cell-surface proteins

Author(s): Martinko, AJ; Truillet, C; Julien, O; Diaz, JE; Horlbeck, MA; Whiteley, G; Blonder, J; Weissman, JS; Bandyopadhyay, S; Evans, MJ; Wells, JA | Abstract: While there have been tremendous efforts to target oncogenic RAS signaling from inside the cell, little effort has focused on the cell-surface. Here, we used quantitative surface proteomics to reveal a signature of proteins that are upregulated on cells transformed with KRASG12V, and driven by MAPK pathway signaling. We next generated a toolkit of recombinant antibodies to seven of these RAS-induced proteins. We found that five of these proteins are broadly distributed on cancer cell lines harboring RAS mutations. In parallel, a cell-surface CRISPRi screen identified integrin and Wnt signaling proteins as critical to RAS-transformed cells. We show that antibodies targeting CDCP1, a protein common to our proteomics and CRISPRi datasets, can be leveraged to deliver cytotoxic and immunotherapeutic payloads to RAS-transformed cancer cells and report for RAS signaling status in vivo. Taken together, this work presents a technological platform for attacking RAS from outside the cell.