Exploring of peptides with affinity to HER2 from random peptide libraries using radioisotope; Random hexapeptide libraries with fixed amino acid sequence at 1 and 2 positions

Sasaki, Ichiro; Hanaoka, Hirofumi*; Yamada, Keiichi*; Watanabe, Shigeki; Sugo, Yumi; Ohshima, Yasuhiro; Suzuki, Hiroyuki; Ishioka, Noriko

We have sought to establish drug discovery system using radioisotope (RI) labeled peptides which have high affinity to target proteins overexpressed in cancers. Of the target proteins, we chose the human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2), a membrane protein overexpressed in various cancers to evaluate the drug discovery system. Three series of random hexapeptide libraries introduced a radioiodinated D-tyrosine (y(3-I)) to -terminal were designed and binding assay with HER2-expressed cell lines were conducted in this study. First, we synthesized a series of random hexapeptide libraries with fixed amino acid sequence at 1 and 2 positions, y(3-I)XXXXXX. Non-radioactive random peptide libraries, yXXXXXX, were prepared by Fmoc-SPPS with an automatic peptide synthesizer. Radioiodinated y(3-I)XXXXXX were subsequently synthesized in 30-50% radiochemical yield. Binding assay using HER2-overexpressed cell line showed that high affinity (38-50% dose, n=6) was obtained with yIIXXXX, while other random peptide libraries were yielded low affinity (approximately 1% dose), which indicated that the system using RI labeled random peptide libraries have potential to discover peptide drug for cancer therapy. Preparation of other random hexapeptide libraries are being undertaken.