The discovery of purine-based agents targeting triple-negative breast cancer and the αB-crystallin/VEGF protein–protein interaction
作者:Nelly A. Fosu-Mensah、Wen Jiang、Andrea Brancale、Jun Cai、Andrew D. Westwell
DOI:10.1007/s00044-018-2275-9
日期:2019.2
Oestrogen receptor-negative breast cancer, particularly subtypes such as triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC, around 10-15% of cases), are characterised by poor long-term survival, poor response to therapy and early progression to metastasis. Purine-based compounds represent a privileged scaffold in anticancer drug design, with several clinically approved and experimental agents in clinical development comprising a purine core structure. In this study, a series of new purine-based compounds were synthesised; seven of the new analogues were found to significantly reduce the in vitro viability of TNBC cell lines (MDA-MB-231 and MDA-MB-436) with IC50 values of 50M. In previous work, we have proposed a new concept for targeting angiogenesis driving TNBC progression, by disrupting the protein-protein interaction between the molecular chaperone B-crystallin (CRYAB) and VEGF. Since previous clinical studies applying anti-VEGF therapy to TNBC patients have met with limited success, we were interested to test our most promising purine analogues against CRYAB/VEGF, using a custom-designed cell-based CRYAB/VEGF(165) interaction assay platform. Analogues 4e and 4f significantly reduced the interaction between CRYAB/VEGF(165), and compound 4e (100M) was also found to decrease the levels of soluble VEGF expressed by MDA-MB-231 cells by 40%. In conclusion, these promising early activity profiles warrant further investigation to validate this concept.