ZIA BC 010451 (ZIA) | |||
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Title | Carbohydrate Antigen-bearing Nanoparticles for Antitumor Therapy | ||
Institution | NCI, Bethesda, MD | ||
Principal Investigator | Barchi, Joseph | NCI Program Director | N/A |
Cancer Activity | N/A | Division | CCR |
Funded Amount | $195,800 | Project Dates | 10/01/2002 - 00/00/0000 |
Fiscal Year | 2014 | Project Type | Intramural |
Research Topics w/ Percent Relevance | Cancer Types w/ Percent Relevance | ||
Bioengineering (90.0%) Cancer (100.0%) Digestive Diseases (50.0%) Metastasis (50.0%) |
Breast (50.0%) Pancreas (50.0%) |
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Research Type | |||
Vaccines Systemic Therapies - Discovery and Development |
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Abstract | |||
An established hallmark of tumorigenesis is the biosynthesis of aberrant glycan chains due to changes in the expression of glycoprocessing enzymes in tumor tissue. These aberrations become more marked as the tumor acquires a more aggressive phenotype. Tumor cell-surface carbohydrates play important roles in the motility and metastasis of many different cancer cells. In addition, many of these aberrant glycans are tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACA) and have been used in the development of tumor vaccines. Since most of the cellular interactions with TACAs are not well understood, there is an urgent need to better characterize the specific molecular interactions that occur during these events. One feature of carbohydrate binding to macromolecules that is well understood is the concept of multivalency: Monomer carbohydrates bind to proteins very weakly while clustering of a monomer raises this affinity as much as a million-fold. We have prepared the important Thomsen-Friedenreich (Tf) antigen (Gal(beta)1-3GalNAc(alpha)-O-Ser/Thr) on very specific templates to take advantage of this so-called cluster glycoside effect. As mentioned in the last report, we have prepared gold self-assembled nanospheres and quantum dots containing sugar derivative and reported preliminary details on their function. The in vivo experiments with our gold nanospheres in mice were conflicting, so we retreated to basics and performed more rigorous characterization and explored a host of new syntheses that allowed for production of more uniform particles. We proceeded to systematically study the optimum procedure, from several related methods, that offered the highest quality particles with regards to stability and uniformity. We have now a new, optimized and reproducible synthesis for gold nanoparticles bearing the TF antigen attached to both eth threonine and serine amino acid residues with a capping acetate at the N-terminal amine group. Examination of these particles in various tumor cell lines for cytotoxicity has been performed and compared against each construct. These cells were chose to be either positive or negative for expression of the anti-apoptotic protein Galectin-3, an in vivo receptor for the TF antigen. Cells that are negative for Gal-3 do not respond to our particles, which suggest that cytotoxicity does go through a Gal-3 mediated pathway. We put a heavy emphasis on preparing particles that encompassed what we consider the best antigen, a glycopeptide from tumor associated cell-surface mucins, and combined that with various concentrations of linker and B-cell epitopes to construct particles that may act as novel immunogens. We prepared at least seven separate particles with various placements of the disaccharide on the peptide, and along with linker and a 28-residue portion of C3d, a domain of complement component 3 and a ligand of CD21, a B-cell surface protein that, when engaged, lowers the threshold of B-cell activation.. These particles were injected into mice and the sera were analyzed for immune responses. A statistically significant immune response was observed in at least two test groups, and animals we boosted a second time with fresh particles. Tumors were implanted and survival was followed. Although one specific antigen group did better than the others, they did not do better than the group that received only PBS. There are several parameters that could have led to a lower than desired response, and we are looking into these now. A full paper in Bioconjugate Chemistry was recently published on this work, and the antitumor activity of some of these constructs has been evaluated by several methods and this paper is written with Kate Rittenhouse-Olson and close to submission. Further work in this area for this research cycle has been to take the aforementioned best construct, called MUC4-5TF, and prepare polyclonal antibody sera. This construct as prepared by us was conjugated to KLH and mice were vaccinated by Precisio" |