Abstract
Abstract Glioblastoma (GBM) is considered one of the most lethal forms of human cancers, and despite considerable advances in multimodality treatments, it remains an incurable disease with an overall survival of 14 to 16 months after diagnosis. Even in the era of personalized medicine and immunotherapy, temozolomide (TMZ), an oral alkylating agent, remains the standard-of-care for GBM. However, intrinisic or acquired resistance to TMZ due to over expression of O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) results in initial treatment inefficacy or tumor relapse, highlighting the significant need for improved treatment strategies. Recently, much effort has been directed towards creating novel TMZ analogs to address the clinical barriers associated with TMZ. While some reported TMZ analogs showed improved brain permeability and anticancer effects in preclinical models, none of them have progressed to testing in humans. There is therefore significant room to improve the brain permeability and anticancer effect profiles of TMZ by incorporating yet unexplored functional groups into new analogs. We have designed and synthesized a series of novel C8-substituted TMZ analogs and have evaluated their anticancer potency against a panel of GBM cell lines with variable levels of MGMT expression. Encouragingly, our analogs demonstrated promising anti-cancer effect in both MGMT low and high expressing lines. We then evaluated our analogs in a variety of cell based assays to compare their activity with TMZ, and performed in vivo brain permeability and anti-tumor efficacy assays in mouse flank models. Our results demonstrated that several of our analogs clearly display improved anti-cancer effects and increased brain permeability over TMZ. This work points to a new direction for the development of novel TMZ analogs for improved patient survival.
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