Interaction of anthracycline disaccharide with human serum albumin: Investigation by fluorescence spectroscopic technique and modeling studies

Anthracyclines are considered to be some of the most effective anticancer drugs for cancer therapy. However, drug resistance and cardiotoxicity of anthracyclines limit their clinical application. An 3′-azido disaccharide analogue of daunorubicin, 7-[4-O-(2,6-dideoxy-3-O-methyl-α-l-arabino-hexopyranosyl)-3-azido-2,3,6-trideoxy-α-l-lyxo-hexopyranosyl]daunorubicinone (ADNR-3), was shown to exhibit 10-fold better activity than parent compound daunorubicin against the drug-resistant cells and completely overcomes the drug resistance with same IC50 in both drug-resistant and drug-sensitive cells. In this paper, the interactions between ADNR-3 and human serum albumin (HSA) have been studied by spectroscopic techniques. By the analysis of fluorescence spectrum and fluorescence intensity, it was observed that the ADNR-3 has a strong ability to quench the intrinsic fluorescence of HSA through a static quenching procedure. The association constants of ADNR-3 with HSA were determined at different temperatures based on fluorescence quenching results. The negative ΔH and positive ΔS values in case of ADNR-3–HSA complexes showed that both hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic interactions play a role in the binding of ADNR-3 to HSA. Furthermore, synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy data and UV–vis absorbance spectra have suggested that the association between ADNR-3 and HSA changed the molecular conformation of HSA and the hydrophobic interactions play a major role in ADNR-3–HSA association. Moreover, the study of computational modeling indicated that ADNR-3 could bind to the site I of HSA and hydrophobic interaction was the major acting force for the second type of binding site, which was in agreement with the thermodynamic analysis. The distance, r, between donor (HSA) and acceptor (ADNR-3) was obtained according to the Förster's theory of non-radiation energy transfer. In addition, the effects of common ions on the binding constants of ADNR-3–HSA complexes were also investigated.