Characterization of Chemical Interactions between Clinical Drugs and the Oral Bacterium, Corynebacterium matruchotii,...

In the field of natural product research, the rediscovery of already-known compounds is one of the significant issues hindering new drug development. Recently, an innovative approach called bioactivity-HiTES has been developed to overcome this limitation, and several new bioactive metabolites have been successfully characterized by this method. In this study, we applied bioactivity-HiTES to Corynebacterium matruchotii, the human oral bacterium, with 3120 clinical drugs as potential elicitors. As a result, we identified two cryptic metabolites, methylindole-3-acetate (MIAA) and indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), elicited by imidafenacin, a urinary antispasmodic drug approved by the Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA). MIAA showed weak antibacterial activity against a pulmonary disease-causing Mycobacterium conceptionense with an IC₅₀ value of 185.7 μM. Unexpectedly, we also found that C. matruchotii metabolized fludarabine phosphate, a USFDA-approved anticancer drug, to 2-fluoroadenine which displayed moderate antibacterial activity against both Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli, with IC₅₀ values of 8.9 and 20.1 μM, respectively. Finally, acelarin, a prodrug of the anticancer drug gemcitabine, was found to exhibit unreported antibacterial activity against B. subtilis with an IC₅₀ value of 33.6 μM through the bioactivity-HiTES method as well. These results indicate that bioactivity-HiTES can also be applied to discover biotransformed products in addition to finding cryptic metabolites in microbes.