Generation of reactive oxygen radicals through bioactivation of mitomycin antibiotics

Mitomycin C (MC) is a naturally occurring anticancer agent which has been shown to be more cytotoxic to hypoxic tumor cells than to their aerobic counterparts. The mechanism of action of this agent is thought to involve biological reductive activation, to a species that alkylates DNA. A comparison of the cytotoxicity of MC to EMT6 tumor cells with that of the structural analogues porfiromycin (PM), N-(N',N'-dimethylaminomethylene)amine analogue of mitomycin C (BMY-25282), and N-(N',N'-dimethylaminomethylene)amine analogue of porfiromycin (BL-6783) has demonstrated that PM is considerably less cytotoxic to aerobic EMT6 cells than MC, whereas BMY-25282 and BL-6783 are significantly more toxic. The relative abilities of each of these compounds to generate oxygen free radicals following biological activation were measured. Tumor cell sonicates, reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate-cytochrome c reductase, xanthine oxidase, and mitochondria were used as the biological reducing systems. All four mitomycin antibiotics produced oxygen radicals following biological reduction, a process that may account for the aerobic cytotoxicity of agents of this class. The generation of relative amounts of superoxide and hydroxyl radical were also measured in EMT6 cell sonicates. BMY-25282 and BL-6783 produced significantly greater quantities of oxygen free radicals with the EMT6 cell sonicate, reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate-cytochrome c reductase, and mitochondria than did MC and PM. In contrast, BMY-25282 and BL-6783 did not generate detectable levels of free radicals in the presence of xanthine oxidase, whereas this enzyme was capable of generating free radicals with MC and PM as substrates. MC consistently produced greater amounts of free radicals than PM with all of the reducing systems. BMY-25282, BL-6783, and MC all generated hydroxyl radicals, while PM did not appear to form these radicals. The findings indicate that a correlation exists between the ability of the mitomycin antibiotics to generate oxygen radicals and their cytotoxicity to aerobic EMT6 tumor cells.