Stable and Oscillatory Hypoxia Differentially Regulate Invasibility of Breast Cancer Associated Fibroblasts

As local regions in the tumor outstrip their oxygen supply, hypoxia can develop, affecting not only the cancer cells, but also other cells in the microenvironment, including cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs). Hypoxia is also not necessarily stable over time, and can fluctuate or oscillate. Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1 is the master regulator of cellular response to hypoxia, and can also exhibit oscillations in its activity. To understand how stable, and fluctuating hypoxia influence breast CAFs, we measured changes in gene expression in CAFs in normoxia, hypoxia, and oscillatory hypoxia, as well as measured change in their capacity to resist, or assist breast cancer invasion. We show that hypoxia has a profound effect on breast CAFs causing activation of key pathways associated with fibroblast activation, but reduce myofibroblast activation and traction force generation. We also found that oscillatory hypoxia, while expectedly resulted in a “sub-hypoxic” response in gene expression, it resulted in specific activation of pathways associated with actin polymerization and actomyosin maturation. Using traction force microscopy, and a nanopatterned stromal invasion assay, we show that oscillatory hypoxia increases contractile force generation vs stable hypoxia, and increases heterogeneity in force generation response, while also additively enhancing invasibility of CAFs to MDA-MB-231 invasion. Our data show that stable and unstable hypoxia can regulate many mechnobiological characteristics of CAFs, and can contribute to transformation of CAFs to assist cancer dissemination and onset of metastasis.