Nature Communications (Jan 2022)

Synthetic prodrug design enables biocatalytic activation in mice to elicit tumor growth suppression

  • Igor Nasibullin,
  • Ivan Smirnov,
  • Peni Ahmadi,
  • Kenward Vong,
  • Almira Kurbangalieva,
  • Katsunori Tanaka

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27804-5
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 1
pp. 1 – 12

Abstract

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Considering the intrinsic toxicities of transition metals, their incorporation into drug therapies must operate at minimal amounts while ensuring adequate catalytic activity within complex biological systems. This study investigates the design of synthetic prodrugs that not only can be tuned to be harmless, but are robustly transformed in vivo to reach therapeutically relevant levels.