Monoclonal antibodies to activated CDK4: use to investigate normal and cancerous cell cycle regulation and involvement of phosphorylations of p21 and p27.

Cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4) is a master integrator that couples mitogenic/oncogenic signaling with the cell division cycle. It is deregulated in most cancers and inhibitors of CDK4 have become standard of care drugs for metastatic estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers and are being evaluated in a variety of other cancers. We previously characterized the T-loop phosphorylation at T172 of CDK4 as the highly regulated step that determines the activity of cyclin D-CDK4 complexes. Moreover we demonstrated that the highly variable detection of T172-phosphorylated CDK4 signals the presence or absence of the active CDK4 targeted by the CDK4/6 inhibitory drugs, which predicts the tumor cell sensitivity to these drugs including palbociclib. To date, the phosphorylation of CDK4 has been very poorly studied because only few biochemical techniques and reagents are available for it. In addition, the available ones including 2D-IEF separation of CDK4 modified forms are considered too tedious. The present report describes the generation, selection and characterization of the first monoclonal antibodies that specifically recognize the active CDK4 phosphorylated on its T172 residue. One key to this success was the immunization with a long phosphopeptide corresponding to the complete activation segment of CDK4. These monoclonal antibodies specifically recognize T172-phosphorylated CDK4 in a variety of assays, including western blotting, immunoprecipitation and, as a capture antibody, a sensitive ELISA from cell lysates. The specific immunoprecipitation of T172-phosphorylated CDK4 allowed to clarify the involvement of phosphorylations of co-immunoprecipitated p21 and p27, showing a privileged interaction of T172-phosphorylated CDK4 with S130-phosphorylated p21 and S10-phosphorylated p27.