Novel prodrugs of decitabine with greater metabolic stability and less toxicity

BACKGROUND: DNA demethylation therapy is now used in practice for hematological tumors and is being developed for solid tumors. Nevertheless, it is difficult to achieve stable pharmacokinetics with the current DNA-demethylating agents, azacitidine (AZA) and decitabine (DAC), because of their rapid deamination by cytidine deaminase in vivo and spontaneous hydrolytic cleavage. Here, we aimed to develop metabolically stable prodrugs of AZA and DAC as novel DNA-demethylating agents. RESULTS: Thirty-five 5′-O-trialkylsilylated AZAs/DACs were synthesized with potential resistance to deamination. Out of these, 11 compounds exhibited demethylating activity similar to that of DAC and guadecitabine, and a suitable aqueous solubility. Pharmacokinetic analysis in mice showed that OR-2003 displayed the highest serum concentration and the area under the curve in an intraperitoneal experiment, whereas OR-2100 exhibited high stability to cytidine deaminase. Treatment of cells with OR-2003 and OR-2100 depleted DNA methyltransferase 1 completely and induced both gene-specific and genome-wide demethylation. The treatment suppressed the growth of multiple types of cancer cells and induced re-expression of tumor suppressor genes. The anti-tumor effect and DNA demethylation effect of OR-2003 and OR-2100 were comparable to that of DAC with fewer adverse effects in vivo. CONCLUSIONS: We developed two novel prodrugs of DAC that exhibited greater stability, comparable DNA demethylation activity, and less toxicity. These compounds are expected to overcome the difficulty in achieving stable pharmacokinetics in patients, leading to maximum DNA demethylation activity with minimum adverse effects. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13148-019-0709-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.