Thiourea Modified Doxorubicin: A Perspective pH-Sensitive Prodrug

A novel approach to the synthesis of pH-sensitive prodrugs has been proposed: thiourea drug modification. Resulting prodrugs can release the cytotoxic agent and the biologically active 2-thiohydantoin in the acidic environment of tumor cells. The concept of acid-catalyzed cyclization of thioureas to 2-thiohydantoins has been proven using a FRET model. Dual prodrugs of model azidothymidine, cytotoxic doxorubicin, and 2-thiohydantoin albutoin were obtained, which release the corresponding drugs in the acidic environment. The resulting doxorubicin prodrug was tested on prostate cancer cells and showed that the thiourea-modified prodrug is less cytotoxic (average IC50 ranging from 0.5584 to 0.9885 μM) than doxorubicin (IC50 ranging from 0.01258 to 0.02559 μM) in neutral pH 7.6 and has similar toxicity (average IC50 ranging from 0.4970 to 0.7994 μM) to doxorubicin (IC50 ranging from 0.2303 to 0.8110 μM) under mildly acidic conditions of cancer cells. Cellular and nuclear accumulation in PC3 tumor cells of Dox prodrug is much higher than accumulation of free doxorubicin.