Drug target discovery by magnetic nanoparticles coupled mass spectrometry

The identification of essential cellular genes is critical for validating drug targets

Accurately identifying biological targets is crucial for advancing treatment options. Essential genes, vital for cell or organism survival, hold promise as potential drug targets in disease treatment. Although many studies have sought to identify essential genes as therapeutic targets in medicine and bioinformatics, systematic reviews on their relationship with drug targets are relatively rare. This work presents a comprehensive analysis to aid in identifying essential genes as potential targets for drug discovery, encompassing their relevance, identification methods, successful case studies, and challenges. This work will facilitate the identification of essential genes as therapeutic targets, thereby boosting new drug development.

The Art of Finding the Right Drug Target: Emerging Methods and Strategies

Drug targets are specific molecules in biological tissues and body fluids that interact with drugs. Drug target discovery is a key component of drug discovery and is essential for the development of new drugs in areas such as cancer therapy and precision medicine. Traditional in vitro or in vivo target discovery methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive, limiting the pace of drug discovery. With the development of modern discovery methods, the discovery and application of various emerging technologies have greatly improved the efficiency of drug discovery, shortened the cycle time, and reduced the cost. This review provides a comprehensive overview of various emerging drug target discovery strategies, including computer-assisted approaches, drug affinity response target stability, multiomics analysis, gene editing, and nonsense-mediated mRNA degradation, and discusses the effectiveness and limitations of the various approaches, as well as their application in real cases. Through the review of the aforementioned contents, a general overview of the development of novel drug targets and disease treatment strategies will be provided, and a theoretical basis will be provided for those who are engaged in pharmaceutical science research. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Target-based drug discovery has been the main approach to drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry for the past three decades. Traditional drug target discovery methods based on in vivo or in vitro validation are time-consuming and costly, greatly limiting the development of new drugs. Therefore, the development and selection of new methods in the drug target discovery process is crucial.

A magnetic beads-based ligand fishing method Coupled with UHPLC-QTOF MS for screening and identification of α-glucosidase inhibitors from Houttuynia cordata Thunb

In this study, a method for the screening and identification of α-glucosidase inhibitors from natural products was developed. The α-glucosidase was immobilized on carboxyl terminated magnetic beads to form a ligand fishing system to screen the potential inhibitors. A total of 9 compounds were fishing out from the crude Houttuynia cordata Thunb. extract. Meanwhile, ultra-high performance liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOF MS) was used for the identification of the chemical structures, including 3 chlorogenic acid isomers, 2 flavone C-glycosides and 4 flavone O-glycosides. The combination of enzyme immobilization magnetic beads and UHPLC-QTOF MS could be used for the screening of bioactive multi-components from herbs with appropriate targets. Taking the advantage of the specificity of enzyme binding and the convenience of magnetic separation, the method has great potential for rapid screening of α-glucosidase inhibitors from complicated natural product extracts.

Virus-like Iron-Gold Heterogeneous Nanoparticles for Drug Target Screening

Drug-target recognition has great impacts on revealing mechanisms of pharmacological activities, especially drug resistance and off-target effects. In recent years, chemoproteomics has been widely used for drug target screening and discovery due to its high-throughput, high accuracy, and sensitivity. However, there still remain challenges on how to efficiently and unambiguously track target proteins from complex biological matrices. Herein, we report a drug target screening method based on virus-like iron-gold heterogeneous nanoparticles (Au@Fe3O4 NPs). The unique structure of Au@Fe3O4 NPs not only maintains the magnetism of Fe3O4 NPs to facilitate protein enrichment and purification, but also increases drug modification by introducing more active sites on the surface of Au NPs. After coincubating the drug modified NPs with the cell lysate, the high loading of drug on the surface of Au@Fe3O4 NPs was beneficial for capturing target proteins with low abundance. This well-designed heterogeneous nanomaterial provides a novel strategy for improving the efficiency and accuracy of affinity-based proteomics.

Nanoparticle Amplification Labeling for High-Performance Magnetic Cell Sorting

Magnetic cell sorting is an enabling tool for the isolation of specific cellular subpopulations for downstream applications and requires the cells to be labeled by a sufficient number of magnetic nanoparticles to leverage magnetophoresis for efficient separation. This requirement makes it challenging to target weakly expressed biomarkers. Here, we developed a new approach that selectively and efficiently amplifies the magnetic labeling on cells through sequentially connected antibodies and nanoparticles delivered to the surface or interior of the cell. Using this approach, we achieved amplification up to 100-fold for surface and intracellular markers. We also demonstrated the utility of this assay for enabling high-performance magnetic cell sorting when it is applied to the analysis of rare tumor cells for cancer diagnosis and the purification of transfected CAR T cells for immunotherapy. The data presented demonstrate a useful tool for the stratification of rare cell subpopulations.

A Poly-Chitosan and Cis-Platinum Conjugated Composite Nanoparticle System for Liver Cancer Therapy

The aim of this study was to test an effective nano-pole capsule loaded cis-platinum (CP) transplantation device for liver cancer (LC) therapy. A novel nano-pole capsule was designed as a new vector for storing CP. HepG2 cells and a B6/J mouse model were used to test the efficiency of polyethyleneimine-cis-platinum (PEI-CP) and poly-chitosan-cis-platinum (PC-CP). Infiltration efficiency and transplantation efficiency tests were performed to study the performance of the delivery system, and fibroblast reactions and macrophage numbers were observed, to test for immune rejection and foreign body reactions. The apoptosis rate and tumor diameter of hepatocellular carcinoma cells were used to evaluate the effect of the tumor therapy. We also studied the functional mechanism of different CP delivery systems. The infiltration and transplantation efficiencies of PC-CP were higher than that of PEI-CP; Less foreign body reaction appeared in PC system, with less fibroblast reaction and lower macrophage reaction. The clinical efficacy of PC-CP in terms of tumor apoptosis and diameter reduction was superior to that of PEI-CP. We demonstrated that PC-CP had a more significant alteration effect on mTOR, P-Ak, LC3 and P53. The PC system can better deliver and release drugs than PEI-CP, and may be a better choice for LC therapy in the future.

Polymerase Chain Reaction in the Detection of miR-455-5p and Sphingosine-1 Phosphate Proteins in Cervical Carcinoma with the Help of Gold Nanoparticles-Based

This study aimed to detect miR-455-5p and S1PR1 proteins using nanoparticle-assisted polymerase chain reaction (nano-PCR) to determine their correlation with cervical carcinoma prognosis. To achieve this study's goals, we selected 48 cervical carcinoma patients between January 2014 to January 2016 and subjected them to the miR-455-5p test by nano-PCR. The collected samples were then divided into two groups based on miR-455-5p levels. We had four HeLa cell groups, one group as the control, and one group overexpressed the miR-455-5p protein. A third group was miR-455-5p silent, and a separate group overexpressed both the miR-455-5p and S1PR1 proteins. Results also proved that the nano-PCR had a higher sensitivity than RT-PCR, and patients with poor prognosis had lesser miR-455-5p levels. Similarly, high levels of miR-455-5 contributed to cancer cell apoptosis and migration inhibition by targeting S1PR1 expression negatively. These two biomarkers are therefore significantly related to the prognosis of cervical carcinoma patients.