NOD2 receptor is an important component of the innate immune system and therefore constitutes a valuable target for the research of new immunomodulators. NOD2 receptors belong to a group of intracellular pattern recognition receptors that detect metabolites of peptidoglycan, which is a part of the cell wall of Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria. The minimal structural fragment that activates NOD2 and consequently exhibits immunostimulatory effects is muramyl dipeptide, which has been developed as a promising adjuvant. Adjuvants are important components of vaccines and improve their efficacy – an increased antibody titer while such vaccines usually also require smaller amounts of antigens. NOD2 agonists can potentially also be used in cancer immunotherapy as an alternative to classical treatment, for treating infections in combination with antibiotics and in treatment of some inflammatory diseases.
In this Master's thesis, we designed, synthesised and evaluated acylated analogues of Gly-L-Ser-D-Glu as potential NOD2 receptor agonists. Our plan was based on recent studies of muramyl dipeptide mimetics, specifically from desmuramyl peptide, in which a trans-ferulic acid was used as an aromatic glycomimetic instead of N-acetylmuramic acid. The main goal was to establish how the replacement of the central L-valine with L-serine affects the NOD2 agonistic activity of compounds. We also synthesised diverse lipophilic analogues to investigate the effect of structure and lipophilicity alterations have on their ability to activate NOD2.
Final compounds were evaluated for the ability to activate NOD2 on HEK293-NOD2 cell line with overexpressed gene for NOD2. Compound 4 based on a Gly-L-Ser-D-Glu core structure carrying a lipophilic benzyl group attached to the serine OH group showed the highest activity of all tested compounds, therefore its immunomodulatory activity was additionally evaluated in functional assays. We examined its effect on cytotoxic ability of peripheral blood mononuclear cells against tumor cells and revealed the compound lacked activity at the concentration of 10 μM. Further, we evaluated the effect of compound 4 on the expression of specific surface markers, important for achieving adjuvant activity, present on monocyte-derived dendritic cells. Compound 4 was found to significantly increase the expression of CD80, CD86 and HLA-DR markers, thereby moderately facilitating dendritic cell maturation.
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