A team of researchers at the
University of Warwick and Monash University has solved a puzzle that has
stumped drug developers for decades: how bacteria naturally create multiple
versions of powerful cancer therapies. The breakthrough could accelerate the
development of new treatments for hard-to-treat cancers.
Harnessing bacterial enzymes to
create drug variants, a strategy known as combinatorial biosynthesis, has long
been a goal for scientists. But without understanding how these enzymes
interact, progress has stalled.
Romidepsin,
sold under the brand name Istodax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romidepsin
Published in Nature
Communications, the researchers have finally revealed how bacterial
enzymes communicate and work together to assemble a family of related
anticancer compounds. This family includes romidepsin (Istodax), a clinically
approved blood cancer treatment. By understanding this
"mix-and-match" process and replicating the principle in the lab, the
researchers have established an approach to designing new therapies.
How the enzymes coordinate
"For decades, we've known
that bacteria can naturally produce multiple versions of powerful anticancer
drugs, yet we had no idea how they achieved this," said first author Dr.
Munro Passmore, a research fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the
University of Warwick.
"This work finally cracks
that code. We've identified how the different enzymes communicate and cooperate
to produce these drug variants, something that has eluded researchers because
the system is so elegantly economical. It's the breakthrough we needed to
actually engineer these drugs ourselves."
The team's analysis reveals that
small molecular regions, termed "docking domains," act as connectors
between the core drug assembly machinery and the variable component-building
enzymes. Crucially, these docking domains use a conserved connection point that
is compatible with multiple different enzyme partners, a feature that explains
how bacteria generate structural diversity while keeping their drugs precise
and effective.
A blueprint for new candidates
The work also traces how these
drug-producing systems evolve naturally. The researchers found that the newly
discovered compound likely evolved from a related drug-producing system through
gene duplications and recombinations.
Greg Challis, Monash Warwick
Alliance professor of sustainable chemistry at the University of Warwick and
Monash University, concluded, "This research gives us a blueprint to do
what nature does, but better and faster. By reverse-engineering nature's
evolutionary logic, we can now design synthetic pathways that generate new
anticancer drug candidates with properties optimized for clinical use, such as
superior potency, improved selectivity and fewer side effects.
"Our immediate goal is to
build an expanded library of candidates for various cancers where new
treatments are urgently needed. This discovery is moving us from understanding
how the systems work to building new ones."
