Toxin-Based Therapeutic Approaches

Shapira, Assaf; Benhar, Itai

Cytotoxic activity of PE, DT and other bacterial toxins (like the anthrax toxin that will be described in the following section) depends on a proteolytic cleavage taking place in an early step of the intoxication process [122, 123, 157, 158, [417] [418] [419] [420] . Since different disease-related cells are sometimes associated with a distinguished extracellular proteolytic activity, as will be discussed shortly, it is conceivable that replacing the natural cleavage site of a toxin with that of a disease-related protease may confer the new molecule with the ability to specifically eradicate disease-related cells (Figure 1 ). Several studies in which such molecules have been developed and preclinically evaluated, classified by their targets, are described in the following chapter. Information about the reviewed and other extracellular activated toxins is summarized in Table 3 .