Natural Products Extracted from Fungal Species as New Potential Anti-Cancer Drugs: A Structure-Based Drug Repurposing Approach Targeting HDAC7

Maruca, Annalisa; Rocca, Roberta; Catalano, Raffaella; Mesiti, Francesco; Costa, Giosuè; Lanzillotta, Delia; Salatino, Alessandro; Ortuso, Francesco; Trapasso, Francesco; Alcaro, Stefano; Artese, Anna

Mushrooms can be considered a valuable source of natural bioactive compounds with potential polypharmacological effects due to their proven antimicrobial, antiviral, antitumor, and antioxidant activities. In order to identify new potential anticancer compounds, an in-house chemical database of molecules extracted from both edible and non-edible fungal species was employed in a virtual screening against the isoform 7 of the Histone deacetylase (HDAC). This target is known to be implicated in different cancer processes, and in particular in both breast and ovarian tumors. In this work, we proposed the ibotenic acid as lead compound for the development of novel HDAC7 inhibitors, due to its antiproliferative activity in human breast cancer cells (MCF-7). These promising results represent the starting point for the discovery and the optimization of new HDAC7 inhibitors and highlight the interesting opportunity to apply the “drug repositioning” paradigm also to natural compounds deriving from mushrooms.