Local immune checkpoint blockade therapy by an adenovirus encoding a novel PD-L1 inhibitory peptide inhibits the growth of colon carcinoma in immunocompetent mice.

A novel peptide that interferes with the PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint pathway, termed PD-L1 inhibitory peptide 3 (PD-L1ip3), was computationally designed, experimentally validated for its specific binding to PD-L1, and evaluated for its antitumor effects in cell culture and in a mouse colon carcinoma syngeneic murine model. In several cell culture studies, direct treatment with PD-L1ip3, but not a similar peptide with a scrambled sequence, substantially increased death of CT26 colon carcinoma cells when co-cultured with murine CD8+ T cells primed by CT26 cell antigens. In a syngeneic mouse tumor model, the growth of CT26 tumor cells transduced with the PD-L1ip3 gene by an adenovirus vector was significantly slower than that of un-transduced CT26 cells in immunocompetent mice. This tumor growth attenuation was further enhanced by the coadministration of the peptide form of PD-L1ip3 (10 mg/kg/day). The current study suggests that this peptide can stimulate host antitumor immunity via blockade of the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway, thereby increasing CD8+ T cell-induced death of colon carcinoma cells. The tumor site-specific inhibition of PD-L1 by an adenovirus carrying the PD-L1ip3 gene, together with direct peptide treatment, may be used as a local immune checkpoint blockade therapy to inhibit colon carcinoma growth.

Structure-based virtual screening of novel, high-affinity BRD4 inhibitors.

Bromodomains (BRDs) are a diverse family of evolutionarily conserved protein-interaction modules. Among various members of the bromodomain and extra terminal domain family, BRD4 is found to be an important target for many diseases such as cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, multiple myeloma, Burkitt's lymphoma, etc. Therefore, in this study an attempt has been made to screen compounds from NCI Diversity, Drug Bank and Toslab Databases targeting the Kac binding site of BRD4 using molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulations, MM-PB/GBSA binding free energy calculations and steered molecular dynamics simulations. Using virtual screening and docking, we have identified 11 inhibitors. These new inhibitors exhibit binding energy values higher than that of the (+)JQ1 inhibitor which is effective against BRD4. However, due to the toxicity of (+)JQ1, the designing of new inhibitors becomes significantly important. Thus, these new 11 ligands were systematically analyzed using other computational investigations. Results reveal that the compounds ZINC01411240, ZINC19632618 and ZINC04818522 could be potential drug candidates for targeting BRD4. It can also be seen from the results that there is a linear relationship between the results obtained from the SMD simulation and free energy obtained from the MM-PBSA/GBSA approach. This study clearly illustrates that the steered molecular dynamics can be effectively used for the design of new inhibitors.