Antitumor Mechanism and Therapeutic Potential of Cordycepin Derivatives

Cordycepin has good antitumor activity, but its clinical application is limited due to the easy deamination of N6 in structure. In this study, a large lipolysis group was introduced at the cordycepin N6 to improve the problem, cordycepin derivatives (3a–4c) were synthesized, and biological evaluation of compounds was studied. In this study, the vitro antitumor activity of the compounds against MCF7 cells, HepG2 cells and SGC-7901 cells was evaluated by MTT assay. In the results, compound4ashowed the most obvious inhibitory effect on MCF7 cells with an IC50value of 27.57 ± 0.52 μM, which was much lower than cordycepin. Compound4ashowed high selectivity between MCF7 and normal MCF-10A cells. Further biological evaluation showed that compound4apromoted apoptosis and blocked the cell cycle in the G0/G1 phase. Then, Western Blot was used to detect related apoptotic proteins. It was found that Compound4acould down-regulate the expression of Bcl-2 protein and up-regulate the expression of p53, Bax, Caspase-3 and Caspase-9 proteins. The mitochondrial membrane potential decreased continuously and the positive expression rate decreased. It was speculated that compound4ainduced the apoptosis of MCF7 cells through the mitochondrial pathway.Keywords:cordycepin derivatives;antitumor;structural modification