Small molecule compounds targeting DNA binding domain of STAT3 for inhibition of tumor growth and metastasis

Abstract

Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) is constitutively activated in malignant tumors, and its activation is associated with high histological grade and advanced cancer stage. STAT3 has been shown to play important roles in multiple aspects of cancer aggressiveness including proliferation, survival, self-renewal, migration, invasion, angiogenesis and immune response by regulating the expression of diverse downstream target genes. Thus, inhibiting STAT3 promises to be an attractive strategy for treatment of advanced tumors with metastatic potential. We firstly identified a STAT3 inhibitor, inS3-54, by targeting the DNA-binding site of STAT3 using an in-silico screening approach; however, inS3-54 was finally found not to be appropriate for further studies because of low specificity on STAT3 and poor absorption in mice. To develop an effective and specific STAT3 inhibitor, we identified 89 analogues for the structure-activity relationship analysis. By using hematopoietic progenitor cells isolated from wild-type and STAT3 conditional knockout mice, further studies showed that three analogues (A18, A26 and A69) only inhibited STAT3-dependent colony formation of hematopoietic progenitor cells, indicating a higher selectivity for STAT3 than their parental compound, inS3-54. These compounds were found to (1) inhibit STAT3-specific DNA binding activity; (2) bind to STAT3 protein; (3) suppress proliferation of cancer cells harboring aberrant STAT3 signaling; (4) inhibit migration and invasion of cancer cells and (5) inhibit STAT3-dependent expression of downstream targets by blocking the binding of STAT3 to the promoter regions of responsive genes in cells. In addition, A18 can reduce tumor growth in a mouse xenograft model of lung cancer with little effect on body weight. Taken together, we conclude that it is feasible to inhibit STAT3 by targeting its DNA-binding domain for discovery of anticancer therapeutics.