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标题：Protease-activated “prodrugs” for cancer chemotherapy
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作者：Philip L. Carl ; Prasun K. Chakravarty ; John A. Katzenellenbogen 等
期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：1980
卷号：77
期号：4
页码：2224-2228
DOI：10.1073/pnas.77.4.2224
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Many types of malignant cells and human tumors display increased concentrations of the protease plasminogen activator that converts plasminogen to the highly active protease, plasmin. Because plasmin rapidly cleaves various low molecular weight compounds coupled to appropriate peptide specifiers, we hypothesized that coupling of such peptide specifiers to anticancer drugs might create "prodrugs" which would be locally activated by tumor-associated plasmin and consequently would be less toxic to normal cells. To provide an initial test of this concept we have synthesized peptidyl prodrugs of the structure D-Val-Leu-Lys-X in which the peptidyl portion has been designed to allow the prodrug to serve as an excellent plasmin substrate and X is an anticancer drug--either the glutamine analog (S,5S) -amino-3-chloro-4,5-dihydro-5-isoxazole-acetic acid (AT-125) or the alkylating agent N,N-bis(2-chloroethyl)-p-phenylenediamine (phenylenediamine mustard). Treatment of these prodrugs with plasmin generated the free peptide and the free drug, demonstrating that these prodrugs are plasmin substrates. The prodrugs and free drugs were tested in an in vitro system against either normal chicken embryo fibroblasts, which display a low level of plasminogen activator, or their virally transformed counterparts, which produce high levels of plasminogen activator. In each case the peptidyl prodrugs displayed at least a 5-fold increase in selectivity for the transformed cells compared to the free drug. The greater selectivity of action of the peptidyl prodrugs against transformed cell cultures suggests that these or similar prodrugs that are substrates for tumor-associated proteases may show increased therapeutic effectiveness in the treatment of tumors that produce sufficiently increased amounts of plasminogen activator.
关键词：plasminogen activator ; plasmin ; fibrinolysis ; antineoplastic agents ; peptides