Selective toxicity of nitracrine to hypoxic mammalian cells.

Hypoxic cells in solid tumours are resistant to ionizing radiation and may be refractory to treatment by many chemotherapeutic agents. For these reasons the identification of drugs with selective toxicity towards hypoxic cells is an important objective in cancer chemotherapy. Nitroimidazoles such as misonidazole demonstrate such hypoxia-selective toxicity but have very low dose potency. The 1-nitroacridine derivative 1-nitro-9-(dimethylaminopropylamino)acridine (nitracrine) binds reversibly to DNA but also forms covalent adducts with DNA in vivo. We have found nitracrine to be selectively toxic to the Chinese hamster ovary cell line AA8 under hypoxic conditions in culture, with a potency approximately 100,000 times higher than that of misonidazole. The effect of oxygen is not a simple dose-modifying one in this system, probably in part because of rapid metabolic inactivation of nitracrine under hypoxic conditions. Viscometric studies with the mini col E1 plasmid PML-21 confirmed that nitracrine binds to DNA by intercalation, and provided an unwinding angle of 16 degrees (relative to 26 degrees for ethidium). It is proposed that the cytotoxicity of nitracrine under hypoxia is due to reductive metabolism to form an alkylating species, but that intercalation of the chromophore may enhance reactivity towards DNA and hence contribute to the marked enhancement of potency with respect to simple nitroheteroaromatic drugs.