Zou Ting, Huang Yun, Zhou Zongtao, He Shuangyan, Liu Jia, Chen Yalan, Liu Hongdu, Luo Zhonghui, Liu Miaoxin, Wei Hua, Yu CuiYun
Hunan Province Cooperative Innovation Center for Molecular Target New Drug Study, School of Pharmaceutical Science & MOE Key Lab of Rare Pediatric Disease, Hengyang Medical School, University of South China, Hengyang, 421001, China.
Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Academy of Chinese Medicine, Hunan Academy of Chinese Medicine, Changsha, 410013, China.
J Nanobiotechnology. 2024 Dec 3;22(1):750. doi: 10.1186/s12951-024-03027-w.
Clinical treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), the primary anticancer agent, remains unsatisfactory due to the glutathione (GSH)-associated drug resistance and immunosuppressive microenvironment of HCC. To develop a facile yet robust strategy to overcome 5-FU resistance for enhanced immunotherapy treatment of HCC via all dimensional GSH exhaustion, we report in this study construction of a minimalist prodrug consisting of 5-FU linked to an indoleamine-(2,3)-dioxygenase (IDO) inhibitor (IND) via a disulfide bridge, FU-SS-IND that can further self-assemble into stabilized nanoparticles, FU-SS-IND NPs. Specifically, besides the disulfide linker-induced GSH exhaustion, IND inhibits GSH biosynthesis and enhances the effector function of T cells for turning a "cold" tumor to a "hot" one, which synergistically achieving a tumor inhibition rate (TIR) of 92.5% in a 5-FU resistant mice model. Most importantly, FU-SS-IND NPs could upregulate programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression on the surface of tumor cells, which enables facile combination with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) for a ultimate prolonged survival lifetime of 5-FU-resistant tumors-bearing mice. Overall, the minimalist bioreducible nano-prodrug developed herein demonstrates great translatable potential for efficiently reversing drug resistance and enhancing immunotherapy of HCC.
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