A Novel Isoflavone, ME-344, Targets the Cytoskeleton in Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The isoflavone ME-344 is a potent anti-cancer agent with preclinical efficacy in solid tumors in vitro and in vivo. In a recently completed phase I clinical trial in patients with refractory solid tumors, ME-344 was well tolerated and clinical responses in refractory patients were observed. ME-344 has been shown to reduce mitochondrial ATP generation in a tumor selective manner, though other potential activities have not been fully defined. In addition, the preclinical efficacy of ME-344 in leukemia has not been established. Therefore, we investigated the anti-leukemic properties and the mechanism of action of ME-344. We treated a panel of 7 leukemia cell lines with increasing concentrations of ME-344, and measured cell growth and viability. ME-344 was cytotoxic to the 7 leukemia cell lines with an IC50 in the range of 70-260 nM. In addition, ME-344 induced preferential death in primary AML patient samples over normal hematopoietic cells. In an OCI-AML2 xenograft model, ME-344 reduced tumor growth by up to 95% of control without evidence of toxicity. Mechanistically, as reported in studies in solid tumors, ME-344 increased mitochondrial ROS generation in leukemic cells. However, antioxidant treatment did not rescue cell death, suggesting that ME-344 has additional targets beyond the mitochondria. To identify additional targets of ME-344, we conducted haplo-insufficiency profiling in S.cerevisiae to identify genes whose heterozygous deletion confers increased sensitivity to ME-344. The top hits from the screen were genes involved in cytoskeletal organization. Therefore, we tested the effects of ME-344 on actin and tubulin polymerization in cell free assays. While ME-344 did not inhibit actin polymerization, it inhibited tubulin polymerization by interacting near the colchicine-binding site and at a site distinct from vinca alkaloids. Furthermore, cells resistant to tubulin inhibitors due to tubulin point mutations were also resistant to ME-344. Finally, we showed that ME-344 synergizes with vinblastine in leukemia cells. Thus, our study demonstrates that ME-344 displays preclinical efficacy in leukemia through a mechanism at least partly related to targeting tubulin polymerization. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".