Comparison of the activity of three different HSP70 inhibitors on apoptosis, cell cycle arrest, autophagy inhibition, and HSP90 inhibition.

The chaperone HSP70 promotes the survival of cells exposed to many different types of stresses, and is also potently anti-apoptotic. The major stress-induced form of this protein, HSP70-1, is overexpressed in a number of human cancers, yet is negligibly expressed in normal cells. Silencing of the gene encoding HSP70-1 (HSPA1A) is cytotoxic to transformed but not normal cells. Therefore, HSP70 is considered to be a promising cancer drug target, and there has been active interest in the identification and characterization of HSP70 inhibitors for cancer therapy. Because HSP70 behaves in a relatively non-specific manner in the control of protein folding, to date there are no reliably-identified "clients" of this protein, nor is there consensus as to what the phenotypic effects of HSP70 inhibitors are on a cancer cell. Here for the first time we compare three recently-identified HSP70 inhibitors, PES-Cl, MKT-077, and Ver-155008, for their ability to impact some of the known and reported functions of this chaperone; specifically, the ability to inhibit autophagy, to influence the level of HSP90 client proteins, to induce cell cycle arrest, and to inhibit the enzymatic activity of the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C). We report that all three of these compounds can inhibit autophagy and cause reduced levels of HSP90 client proteins; however, only PES-Cl can inhibit the APC/C and induce G 2/M arrest. Possible reasons for these differences, and the implications for the further development of these prototype compounds as anti-cancer agents, are discussed.