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¹ Department of Molecular Pharmacology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital; ² Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN; and ³ Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Requests for Reprints: Mary K. Danks, Department of Molecular Pharmacology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, 332 North Lauderdale, Memphis, TN 38015. Phone: (901) 495-3440; Fax: (901) 495-4293. E-mail: mary.danks{at}stjude.org

7-Ethyl-10-[4-(1-piperidino)-1-piperidino]carbonyloxycamptothecin (irinotecan, CPT-11) is a camptothecin prodrug that is metabolized by carboxylesterases (CE) to the active metabolite 7-ethyl-10-hydroxycamptothecin (SN-38), a topoisomerase I inhibitor. CPT-11 has shown encouraging antitumor activity against a broad spectrum of tumor types in early clinical trials, but hematopoietic and gastrointestinal toxicity limit its administration. To increase the therapeutic index of CPT-11 and to develop other prodrug analogues for enzyme/prodrug gene therapy applications, our laboratories propose to develop camptothecin prodrugs that will be activated by specific CEs. Specific analogues might then be predicted to be activated, for example, predominantly by human liver CE(hCE1), by human intestinal CE (hiCE), or in gene therapy approaches using a rabbit liver CE (rCE). This study describes a molecular modeling approach to relate the structure of rCE-activated camptothecin prodrugs with their biological activation. Comparative molecular field analysis, comparative molecular similarity index analysis, and docking studies were used to predict the biological activity of a 4-benzylpiperazine derivative of CPT-11 [7-ethyl-10-[4-(1-benzyl)-1-piperazino]carbonyloxycamptothecin (BP-CPT)] in U373MG glioma cell lines transfected with plasmids encoding rCE or hiCE. BP-CPT has been reported to be activated more efficiently than CPT-11 by a rat serum esterase activity; however, three-dimensional quantitative structure-activity relationship studies predicted that rCE would activate BP-CPT less efficiently than CPT-11. This was confirmed by both growth inhibition experiments and kinetic studies. The method is being used to design camptothecin prodrugs predicted to be activated by specific CEs.

Grant support: In part by NIH grants CA76202, CA79765, CA23099, and CA21765 by the American Lebanese and Syrian Associated Charity and by the College of Pharmacy, University of Tennessee Health Science Center (R.E.L.).

Received 5/14/03; revised 6/19/03; accepted 8/15/03.

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