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Selective in vivo metabolic cell-labeling-mediated cancer targeting

Nature Chemical Biology volume 13, pages 415–424 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Distinguishing cancer cells from normal cells through surface receptors is vital for cancer diagnosis and targeted therapy. Metabolic glycoengineering of unnatural sugars provides a powerful tool to manually introduce chemical receptors onto the cell surface; however, cancer-selective labeling still remains a great challenge. Herein we report the design of sugars that can selectively label cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo. Specifically, we inhibit the cell-labeling activity of tetraacetyl-N-azidoacetylmannosamine (Ac4ManAz) by converting its anomeric acetyl group to a caged ether bond that can be selectively cleaved by cancer-overexpressed enzymes and thus enables the overexpression of azido groups on the surface of cancer cells. Histone deacetylase and cathepsin L-responsive acetylated azidomannosamine, one such enzymatically activatable Ac4ManAz analog developed, mediated cancer-selective labeling in vivo, which enhanced tumor accumulation of a dibenzocyclooctyne–doxorubicin conjugate via click chemistry and enabled targeted therapy against LS174T colon cancer, MDA-MB-231 triple-negative breast cancer and 4T1 metastatic breast cancer in mice.

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Figure 1: Design of sugars for controlled metabolic labeling.
Figure 2: Replacing the C1–OAc of Ac4ManAz with a cleavable ether bond–enabled controlled metabolic cell labeling in vitro and in vivo.
Figure 3: DCL-AAM-mediated cancer-selective labeling in vitro.
Figure 4: DCL-AAM mediated cancer-selective labeling in vivo.
Figure 5: DCL-AAM-mediated tumor labeling improved antitumor efficacy of DBCO–drug conjugate against primary LS174T colon tumor and MDA-MB-231 triple-negative breast tumor models.
Figure 6: DCL-AAM-mediated tumor labeling improved anticancer efficacy of DBCO–drug conjugate against 4T1 lung metastases.

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Acknowledgements

J.C. acknowledges support from the United States National Institute of Health (Director's New Innovator Award 1DP2OD007246), which partially supported the in vivo part of the research, and National Science Foundation (DMR 1309525), which partially supported the chemical design and synthesis of the work. L.Y. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51403145 and 51573123), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2016YFA0201200), the Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD). X.C. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51528303). H.W. was supported via a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowship. K.C. and Q.Y. acknowledge Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowship support at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. K.C., Q.Y., and L.T. acknowledge support from the NIH National Cancer Institute Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer “Midwest Cancer Nanotechnology Training Center” Grant R25 CA154015A. R.W. acknowledges the support of a CSTAR/T32 Fellowship through the NIH T32 Tissue Microenvironment Training Program. We acknowledge R. Tong and V. Mirshafiee for their early work related to the design of this project. We also acknowledge H. Ying and Y. Zhang for their useful discussions.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Hua Wang, Ruibo Wang and Kaimin Cai: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana−Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Hua Wang, Ruibo Wang, Kaimin Cai, Yang Liu, Zhiyu Wang, Ming Xu, Yiwen Sun, Qian Yin, Li Tang & Jianjun Cheng

  2. Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Carbon-Based Functional Materials & Devices, Institute of Functional Nano & Soft Materials (FUNSOM), Soochow University, Jiangsu, China

    Hua He, Lichen Yin & Jianjun Cheng

  3. Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Jonathan Yen, Lawrence W Dobrucki, Stephen A Boppart & Jianjun Cheng

  4. Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China.,

    Xin Zhou

  5. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Iwona T Dobrucki, Eric J Chaney, Stephen A Boppart & Jianjun Cheng

  6. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Stephen A Boppart

  7. Department of Internal Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Stephen A Boppart

  8. Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Timothy M Fan

  9. Department of Pathobiology at College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Stéphane Lezmi

  10. Key Laboratory of Polymer Ecomaterials, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Changchun, People's Republic of China

    Xuesi Chen

  11. Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Jianjun Cheng

  12. Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana−Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Jianjun Cheng

  13. Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Jianjun Cheng

Authors
  1. Hua Wang
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Contributions

J.C. conceived the original concept of the two-step targeting strategy and supervised the entire project. J.C., H.W., Q.Y. and L.T. initiated this project. H.W. demonstrated the controlled labeling strategy using ether-caged Ac3ManAz derivatives and designed DCL-AAM under the supervision of J.C. H.W. performed the initial synthesis of DCL-AAM. R.W. and K.C. enabled the synthesis of high-purity DCL-AAM. H.W. performed the experiments of flow cytometry and confocal imaging with the help of Y.L. and J.Y. H.W., M.X., Y.S., X.Z. and E.J.C. designed and performed in vivo imaging studies under the supervision of J.C., I.T.D., L.W.D. and S.A.B. H.W., H.H., R.W., Z.W. and K.C. designed and performed tumor efficacy studies under the supervision of J.C., L.Y., X.C., S.L. and T.M.F. H.W., J.C., L.Y., S.L., T.M.F. and X.C. analyzed data. L.Y., X.C., T.M.F. and S.L. provided other expertise and critical feedback. H.W., J.C., L.Y., S.L. and T.M.F. wrote the paper with input from other authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xuesi Chen, Lichen Yin or Jianjun Cheng.

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Supplementary Results and Supplementary Figures 1–17. (PDF 7431 kb)

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Synthetic Procedures. (PDF 697 kb)

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Wang, H., Wang, R., Cai, K. et al. Selective in vivo metabolic cell-labeling-mediated cancer targeting. Nat Chem Biol 13, 415–424 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2297

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