Metabolism‐focused CRISPR screen unveils mitochondrial pyruvate carrier 1 as a critical driver for PARP inhibitor resistance in lung cancer

Homologous recombination (HR) and poly ADP‐ribosylation are partially redundant pathways for the repair of DNA damage in normal and cancer cells. In cell lines that are deficient in HR, inhibition of poly (ADP‐ribose) polymerase (poly (ADP‐ribose) polymerase [PARP]1/2) is a proven target with several PARP inhibitors (PARPis) currently in clinical use. Resistance to PARPi often develops, usually involving genetic alterations in DNA repair signaling cascades, but also metabolic rewiring particularly in HR‐proficient cells. We surmised that alterations in metabolic pathways by cancer drugs such as Olaparib might be involved in the development of resistance to drug therapy. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a metabolism‐focused clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats knockout screen to identify genes that undergo alterations during the treatment of tumor cells with PARPis. Of about 3000 genes in the screen, our data revealed that mitochondrial pyruvate carrier 1 (MPC1) is an essential factor in desensitizing nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) lung cancer lines to PARP inhibition. In contrast to NSCLC lung cancer cells, triple‐negative breast cancer cells do not exhibit such desensitization following MPC1 loss and reprogram the tricarboxylic acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation pathways to overcome PARPi treatment. Our findings unveil a previously unknown synergistic response between MPC1 loss and PARP inhibition in lung cancer cells.