In the soft treatment of cancer tumours, consequent downregulation of the malignant tissue angiogenesis constitutes an efficient way to stifle tumour development and metastasis spreading. As angiogenesis requires integrin-promoting endothelial cell adhesion, migration, and vessel tube formation, integrins represent potential targets of new therapeutic anti-angiogenic agents. Our work is a contribution to the research of such therapeutic disintegrins in animal venoms. We report isolation of one peptide, named Dabmaurin-1, from the hemotoxic venom of snake Daboia mauritanica, and we evaluate its potential anti-tumour activity through in vitro inhibition of the human vascular endothelial cell HMECs functions involved in tumour angiogenesis. Dabmaurin-1 altered, in a dose-dependent manner, without any significant cytotoxicity, HMEC proliferation, adhesion, and their mesenchymal migration onto various extracellular matrix proteins, as well as formation of capillary-tube mimics on MatrigelTM. Via experiments involving HMEC or specific cancers cells integrins, we demonstrated that the above Dabmaurin-1 effects are possibly due to some anti-integrin properties. Dabmaurin-1 was demonstrated to recognize a broad panel of prooncogenic integrins (αvβ6, αvβ3 or αvβ5) and/or particularly involved in control of angiogenesis α5β1, α6β4, αvβ3 or αvβ5). Furthermore, mass spectrometry and partial N-terminal sequencing of this peptide revealed, it is close to Lebein-1, a known anti-β1 disintegrin from Macrovipera lebetina venom. Therefore, our results show that if Dabmaurin-1 exhibits in vitro apparent anti-angiogenic effects at concentrations lower than 30 nM, it is likely because it acts as an anti-tumour disintegrin.
Keywords: angiogenesis; anti–angiogenic peptide; anti–tumour; cell adhesion molecules; disintegrin; endothelial cells; integrin; snake venom.