Discovery of dual PARP/NAMPT inhibitors for the treatment of BRCA wild-type triple-negative breast cancer

  • Bioorg Med Chem Lett. 2025 Jan 30:120:130117. doi: 10.1016/j.bmcl.2025.130117.
Jie Mao  1 Kaizhen Wang  1 Jun Tong  1 Wanheng Zhang  1 Guoqing Shen  1 Dexiang Wang  1 Zepeng Liao  1 Zhiyi Zhang  1 Qi Miao  1 Sheng Jiang  2 Kuojun Zhang  3
Affiliations
  • 1. Department of Medicinal Chemistry, School of Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing 210009 China.
  • 2. Department of Medicinal Chemistry, School of Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing 210009 China. Electronic address: [email protected].
  • 3. Department of Medicinal Chemistry, School of Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing 210009 China. Electronic address: [email protected].
Abstract

Simultaneous inhibition of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) and nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase (NAMPT) has been shown to be synergistically effective against breast Cancer susceptibility (BRCA) wild-type triple-negative breast Cancer (TNBC) through synthetic lethality, which may be explored to broaden the clinical utility of PARP inhibitors. Herein, we report the discovery of dual PARP/NAMPT inhibitors through a pharmacophore linking approach. The lead compound 13j with potent inhibitory activity against both PARP1 and NAMPT (IC50 = 0.8 and 18 nM, respectively) effectively inhibited the proliferation of TNBC MDA-MB-231 cells with wild-type BRCA at submicromolar level. Mechanically, 13j disrupted the homologous recombination repair (HRR) pathway, caused the accumulation of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and ultimately induced apoptotic cell death. In addition, this compound exhibited potent inhibitory potency on the migration of MDA-MB-231 cells. This study demonstrates that compound 13j is a promising lead compound for the development of better PARP/NAMPT inhibitors to treat TNBC with wild-type BRCA.

Keywords
Antimigration; Antiproliferation; Dual PARP/NAMPT inhibitor; TNBC.
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