BAG-1 prevents stress-induced long-term growth inhibition in breast cancer cells via a chaperone-dependent pathway.

BAG-1 is a multifunctional protein that interacts with a wide range of cellular targets. There is accumulating evidence that overexpression of BAG-1 may play an important role in breast cancer; however, the functional consequences of BAG-1 expression and its mechanism of action in breast cancer cells have not been studied in detail. Here we demonstrate that BAG-1 overexpression completely protected breast cancer cells from apoptosis and long-term growth inhibition induced by heat shock and also partially protected cells from other stresses, including hypoxia, radiation, and chemotoxic drugs. BAG-1 exists as three protein isoforms, and all isoforms prevented stress-induced growth inhibition. This required a conserved lysine in the BAG-1S ubiquitin-like domain thought to be important for proteasome binding and COOH-terminal amino acids required for interaction with the chaperone molecules, Hsc70 and Hsp70. Although expression of BAG-1 was unaltered by heat shock, endogenous and overexpressed BAG-1S relocalized from the cytoplasm to the nucleus after heat shock. The endogenous BAG-1S.Hsc70/Hsp70 complex dissociated after heat shock but was maintained at a detectable level in cells overexpressing BAG-1S. BAG-1-mediated resistance to stress-induced growth inhibition is likely to have a major impact on the development and response to therapy of breast cancer. Targeting the interaction of BAG-1 with chaperones is an attractive strategy to counter the biological effects of BAG-1.