Activatable zymography probes enable in situ localization of protease dysregulation in cancer
Name
2020.07.29.227413v1.full.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
15.58 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
1089ea241941ac24e5de385b64483f54
Author(s)
Soleimany, Ava P.
Kirkpatrick, Jesse D.
Su, Susan
Dudani, Jaideep S.
Zhong, Qian
Bekdemir, Ahmet
Bhatia, Sangeeta N.
Date Issued
October 2020
Journal
Cancer Research
Publisher
American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
©2020 American Association for Cancer Research. Recent years have seen the emergence of conditionally activated diagnostics and therapeutics that leverage protease-cleavable peptide linkers to enhance their specificity for cancer. However, due to a lack of methods to measure and localize protease activity directly within the tissue microenvironment, the design of protease-activated agents has been necessarily empirical, yielding suboptimal results when translated to patients. To address the need for spatially resolved protease activity profiling in cancer, we developed a new class of in situ probes that can be applied to fresh-frozen tissue sections in a manner analogous to immunofluorescence staining. These activatable zymography probes (AZP) detected dysregulated protease activity in human prostate cancer biopsy samples, enabling disease classification. AZPs were leveraged within a generalizable framework to design conditional cancer diagnostics and therapeutics and showcased in the Hi-Myc mouse model of prostate cancer, which models features of early pathogenesis. Multiplexed screening against barcoded substrates yielded a peptide, S16, that was robustly and specifically cleaved by tumor-associated metalloproteinases in the Hi-Myc model. In situ labeling with an AZP incorporating S16 revealed a potential role of metalloproteinase dysregulation in proliferative, premalignant Hi-Myc prostatic glands. Systemic administration of an in vivo imaging probe incorporating S16 perfectly classified diseased and healthy prostates, supporting the relevance of ex vivo activity assays to in vivo translation. We envision AZPs will enable new insights into the biology of protease dysregulation in cancer and accelerate the development of conditional diagnostics and therapeutics for multiple cancer types. Significance: Visualization of protease activity within the native tissue context using AZPs provides new biological insights into protease dysregulation in cancer and guides the design of conditional diagnostics and therapeutics.
MIT Department
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT
Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1158/0008-5472.can-20-2410
