Chemists find help from nature in fighting cancer

Inspired by a chemical that fungi secrete to defend their territory, MIT chemists have synthesized and tested several dozen compounds that may hold promise as potential cancer drugs.

A few years ago, MIT researchers led by associate professor of chemistry Mohammad Movassaghi became the first to chemically synthesize 11,11’-dideoxyverticillin, a highly complex fungal compound that has shown anti-cancer activity in previous studies.

In the new study, recently published online in the journal Chemical Science, Movassaghi and colleagues at MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) designed and tested 60 compounds for their ability to kill human cancer cells.

“What was particularly exciting to us was to see, across various cancer cell lines, that some of them are quite potent,” Movassaghi says.

Lead author of the paper is MIT postdoc Nicolas Boyer. Other authors are MIT graduate student Justin Kim, UIUC chemistry professor Paul Hergenrother and UIUC graduate student Karen Morrison.

Many of the compounds tested in this study, known as epipolythiodiketopiperazine (ETP) alkaloids, are naturally produced by fungi. Scientists believe these compounds help fungi prevent other organisms from encroaching on their territory.

The compounds that kill cancer cells appear to be very selective, destroying them 1,000 times more effectively than they kill healthy blood cells.

The researchers also identified sections of the compounds that can be altered without discernably changing their activity. This is useful because it could allow chemists to use those points to attach the compounds to a delivery agent such as an antibody that would target them to cancer cells, without impairing their cancer-killing ability.

Larry Overman, a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Irvine, says the new study is an impressive advance.The research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/chemists-find-help-from-nature-in-fighting-cancer-0227.html