Actinomycin D causes multidrug resistance and differentiation in a human rhabdomyosarcoma cell line.

The emergence of drug-resistant tumor cells remains a major problem in cancer chemotherapy. Resistance to multiple unrelated antineoplastic drugs may be related, in part, to expression of the P-glycoprotein. The cell line RD, derived from an embryonic rhabdomyosarcoma tumor, was used as an in vitro model to examine the development of drug resistance. A cell line resistant to actinomycin D (RD-DAC) was developed by growing RD in increasing concentrations of the drug. The ID50 (concentration of drug needed to induce a 50% reduction in cell growth) of the resultant line to actinomycin D was more than 15 times that of the parental line. The resistant line was cross-resistant to vincristine and doxorubicin. Resistance to actinomycin D resulted in increased P-glycoprotein expression, which was associated with a change in desmin and vimentin expression. These results suggest that exposure to chemotherapeutic drugs can induce not only classical multidrug resistance, but also a process of cellular differentiation in rhabdomyosarcoma cells.