Abstract
Autophagy promotes cancer cell survival and drug resistance by degrading harmful cellular components and maintaining cellular energy levels. Disruption of autophagy may be a promising approach to sensitize cancer cells to anticancer drugs. The combination of autophagic inhibitors, such as chloroquine (CQ) and lucanthone with conventional cancer therapeutics has been investigated in clinical trials, but adverse drug-drug interactions are a high possibility. Here we designed and synthesized a novel, small-molecule library based on an acridine skeleton and the CQ structure with various modifications and substitutions and screened the compounds for effective autophagy inhibition. We found that 9-chloro-2-(3-(dimethylamino)propyl)pyrrolo[2,3,4-kl]acridin-1(2H)-one (LS-1-10) was the most effective from our library at inhibiting autophagic-mediated degradation and could decrease the viability of multiple colon cancer cells. In addition, LS-1-10 induced DNA damage and caspase 8-mediated apoptosis. Overall, this small molecule was more efficient at reducing the viability of cancer cells than other conventional chemotherapeutic agents, such as CQ and amsacrine. The anticancer and autophagy-inhibiting activities of LS-1-10 were confirmed in vivo in a xenograft mouse model. Collectively, this study has identified a new and efficient single compound with both autophagy-inhibiting and anticancer activity, which may provide a novel approach for cancer therapy.