Methoxy stilbenes as potent, specific, untransported, and noncytotoxic inhibitors of breast cancer resistance protein

The ABCG2 multidrug transporter is known to confer cancer cell multidrug resistance by causing the efflux of anticancer drugs; therefore, selective inhibitors have the potential to improve chemotherapeutic treatments. Here, various methoxy derivatives of resveratrol are shown to be potent inhibitors of mitoxantrone efflux by ABCG2: among a series of 11 derivatives, compound 9 (3,5,3′,4′-tetramethoxy trans-stilbene) had an IC50 of 0.16 μM and showed a maximal inhibition of 75%, as measured by flow cytometry. It was not transported, as shown by HPLC fractionation and mass spectrometry titration and the lack of any cross-resistance in cell survival experiments. Compound 9 had a very low intrinsic cytotoxicity and was able to chemosensitize the growth of resistant ABCG2- transfected HEK293 cells at submicromolar concentrations. Drug-efflux inhibition was specific for ABCG2 since very low effects were observed with ABCB1 and ABCC1. The action mechanism of compound 9 was different from that of GF120918, which produced a complete and partly competitive but not ABCG2-specific inhibition, since ABCB1 was even more strongly inhibited. The two inhibitors also displayed different effects on the ABCG2 vanadate-sensitive ATPase activity, suggesting that they either bound to distinct sites or induced different conformational changes. Mitoxantrone efflux was fully inhibited by combining low concentrations of compound 9 with either GF120918 or a transport substrate such as prazosin or nilotinib. We conclude that methoxy derivatives of stilbene are good candidates for investigating future in vivo modulation of ABCG2 drug-efflux activity.