Tumor-targeted metabolic inhibitor prodrug labelled with cyanine dyes enhances immunoprevention of lung cancer

Recent progress in targeted metabolic therapy of cancer has been limited by the considerable toxicity associated with such drugs. To address this challenge, we developed a smart theranostic prodrug system that combines a fluorophore and an anticancer drug, specifically 6-diazo-5-oxo-l-norleucine (DON), using a thioketal linkage (TK). This system enables imaging, chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy, and on-demand drug release upon radiation exposure. The optimized prodrug, DON-TK-BM3, incorporating cyanine dyes as the fluorophore, displayed potent reactive oxygen species release and efficient tumor cell killing. Unlike the parent drug DON, DON-TK-BM3 exhibited no toxicity toward normal cells. Moreover, DON-TK-BM3 demonstrated high tumor accumulation and reduced side effects, including gastrointestinal toxicity, in mice. This study provides a practical strategy for designing prodrugs of metabolic inhibitors with significant toxicity stemming from their lack of tissue selectivity.

Application of organic fluorescent probe-assisted near infrared fluorescence imaging in cervical cancer diagnosis / 生物工程学报

Fluorescence imaging has been widely used in the fields of biomedicine and clinical diagnosis. Compared with traditional fluorescence imaging in the visible spectral region (400-760 nm), near-infrared (NIR, 700-1 700 nm) fluorescence imaging is more helpful to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the sensitivity of imaging. Highly-sensitive fluorescent probes are required for high-quality fluorescence imaging, and the rapid development of nanotechnology has led to the emergence of organic dyes with excellent fluorescent properties. Among them, organic fluorescent probes with the advantages of high safety, good biocompatibility, and high optical stability, are more favorable than inorganic fluorescent probes. Therefore, NIR fluorescence imaging assisted with organic fluorescent probes can provide more structural and dynamic information of biological samples to the researchers, which becomes a hot spot in the interdisciplinary research field of optics, chemistry and biomedicine. This review summarizes the application of NIR organic fluorescent probes in cervical cancer imaging. Several typical organic fluorescent probes (such as indocyanine green, heptamethine cyanine dye, rhodamine and polymer fluorescent nanoparticles) assisted NIR fluorescence imaging and their applications in cervical cancer diagnosis were introduced, and the future development and application of these techniques were discussed.

Fluorescence Quenching Causes Systematic Dye Bias in Microarray Experiments Using Cyanine Dye

The development of microarray technology has facilitated the understanding of gene expression profiles. Despite its convenience, the cause of dye-bias that confounds data interpretation in dual-color DNA microarray experiments is not well known. In order to economize time and money, it is necessary to identify the cause of dye bias, since designing dye-swaps to reduce the dye-specific bias tends to be very expensive. Hence, we sought to determine the reliable cause of systematic dye bias after treating murine macrophage RAW 264.7 cells with 2-keto-3-deoxyoctonate (KDO), interferon-beta (IFN-beta), and 8-bromoadenosine (8-BR). To find the cause of systematic dye bias from the point of view of fluorescence quenching, we examined the correlation between systematic dye bias and the proportion of each nucleotide in mRNA and oligonucleotide probe sequence. Cy3-dye bias was highly correlated with the proportion of adenines. Our results support the fact that systematic dye bias is affected by fluorescence quenching of each feature. In addition, we also found that the strength of fluorescence quenching is based on not only dye-dye interactions but also dye-nucleotide interactions as well.