Co-Prodrugs of 7-Ethyl-10-hydroxycamptothecin and Vorinostat with in Vitro Hydrolysis and Anticancer Effects

Shuangxi Liu; Zonglong Hu; Qiumeng Zhang; Qiwen Zhu; Yi Chen; Wei Lu

doi:10.1021/acsomega.9b02786

Co-Prodrugs of 7-Ethyl-10-hydroxycamptothecin and Vorinostat with in Vitro Hydrolysis and Anticancer Effects

ACS Omega. 2019 Dec 23;5(1):350-357. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.9b02786. eCollection 2020 Jan 14.

Authors

Shuangxi Liu¹, Zonglong Hu^{2

3}, Qiumeng Zhang^{1

2}, Qiwen Zhu¹, Yi Chen², Wei Lu¹

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Molecular Therapeutics and New Drug Development, School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, East China Normal University, 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai 200062, P. R. China.
² Division of Anti-Tumor Pharmacology, State Key Laboratory of Drug Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201203, P. R. China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, P. R. China.

Abstract

7-Ethyl-10-hydroxycamptothecin (SN38) and vorinostat (SAHA) are quite promising combination therapy agents applied to the clinical treatment of cancer. In this study, we designed and synthesized a series of novel SN38-SAHA co-prodrugs, which were conjugated by four different amino acids including glycine, alanine, aminobutyric acid, and 6-aminocaproic acid. The hydrolytic reconversion rate to SN38 and SAHA critically depended on the carbon chain length, which were evaluated in PBS (pH 6.0/7.4) and plasma (human/mouse). With decreasing amino acid chain length, the hydrolytic reconversion rate increased gradually. The in vitro cytotoxicity test was evaluated by the sulforhodamine B (SRB) assay on the human lung adenocarcinoma cell line A549 and human colorectal cancer cell line HCT116. With the evaluation of stability and in vitro cytotoxicity, an appropriate linker was found, and the active drug can be released efficiently from compound 3a, which exhibited strong antiproliferative activity in A549 and HCT-116 cell lines correspondingly. These results indicated that the well-designed co-prodrug 3a and this kind of strategy can be a promising approach for anticancer therapy.