Download Abstract

Enzyme-instructed self-assembly (EISA) as a multistep molecular process for selectively
killing cancer cells
Bing Xu
Department of Chemistry, Brandeis University, 415 South St, Waltham, MA 02453
*[email protected]
While molecular-targeted therapeutics, which mostly are based on ligand-receptor interaction or enzyme
inhibition, have been a key strategy for developing anticancer therapeutics, recent advances in cancer
biology have revealed the great complexity of cancers, such as redundant signaling pathways, adaptive
drug resistance, genomic instability, intratumoral heterogeneity, and tumor microenvironment. These
insights not only elucidate the limitation of the current cancer therapy that aims to only one or two
molecular targets (e.g., enzymes, receptors, or transcription factors), but also underscore an urgent need of
new approaches for future cancer therapy. In this talk, we highlight enzyme-instructed self-assembly
(EISA)—the integration of enzymatic transformation (ET) and self-assembly (SA)--for the development
of molecular medicines for future cancer therapy. Enzymatic transformation allows one to develop
approaches to target “undruggable” targets or “untargetable” features of cancer cells; self-assembly
provides the opportunity for simultaneously interacting with multiple targets. Using the phosphatase
catalysis and the self-assembly of small peptides as examples, we will discuss the integration of ET and
SA to inhibit multidrug resistance (MDR) cancers in vitro and in vivo, and illustrate a new approach for
developing anticancer nanomedicines for targeting multiple hallmarks of cancer that are the major
challenges in current cancer therapy.