A novel candidate compound with urethane structure for anticancer drug development.

Diethyl-4,4'-methylenebis(N-phenylcarbamate) (MDU) is a urethane compound that we originally synthesized, along with three other compounds, to investigate how polyurethane is hydrolysed. We tested the four compounds for cytotoxicity in two Chinese hamster cell lines (CHL and V79) and a human cancer cell line (HeLa S3). MDU showed the strongest cytotoxicity in all the cell lines with an IC50 of around 0.1 microg/ml. We further investigated MDU for its ability to induce chromosome aberrations (CAs) and micronuclei (MN) in CHL cells. MDU induced around 100% polyploid cells at 0.5 microg/ml after 24- and 48-h treatment in the CA test and a significantly increased frequency of micronuclei, polynuclear cells, and mitotic cells in the MN test, suggesting that it may induce numerical CAs. MDU's ability to cause mitotic arrest in CHL cells was greater than that of taxol and colchicine. Based on a COMPARE analysis using JFCR39, a panel of cancer cell lines, we predicted MDU to be a tubulin inhibitor. We confirmed this possibility in nerve growth factor-stimulated PC12 cells as well as in HT1080 cells, in which MDU exhibited the activity to inhibit tubulin polymerization. MDU is simpler in structure than existing anticancer drugs taxol and vincristine and can be synthesized relatively easily. Here we offer MDU as a potential new type of anticancer drug, stable even at room temperature, and inexpensive.