Hypoxia potentiates the capacity of melanoma cells to evade cisplatin and doxorubicin cytotoxicity via glycolytic shift.

The hypoxic environment within solid tumors impedes the efficacy of chemotherapeutic treatments. Here, we demonstrate that hypoxia augments the capacity of melanoma cells to withstand cisplatin and doxorubicin cytotoxicity. We show that B16F10 cells derived from spontaneously formed melanoma and YUMM1.7 cells, engineered to recapitulate human-relevant melanoma driver mutations, profoundly differ in their vulnerabilities to cisplatin and doxorubicin. The differences are manifested in magnitude of proliferative arrest and cell death rates, extent of mtDNA depletion, and impairment of mitochondrial respiration. In both models, cytotoxicity is mitigated by hypoxia, which augments glycolytic metabolism. Collectively, the findings implicate metabolic reprogramming in drug evasion and suggest that melanoma tumors with distinct genetic makeup may have differential drug vulnerabilities, highlighting the importance of precision anticancer treatments.