All-in-One Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Kinase Inhibitor for Tracking, Targeting, and Enhanced Efficacy.

The metabolic preference of cells toward glycolysis often indicates a diseased state ranging from cancer to other dysfunctions. When a particular cell type utilizes glycolysis as a major energy production pathway, their mitochondria become impaired resulting a cascade of events which eventually contributes to resistance toward therapies to tackle such diseases. In abnormal tissues such as seen in the tumor microenvironment, when cancer cells utilize glycolysis, other cell types such as the immune cells switch their metabolism and prefer such glycolysis. As a result, utilization of therapies to destroy glycolytic preferences by cancer cells results in destruction of immune cells contributing toward an immunosuppressive phenotype. Thus, development of targeted, trackable, comparatively stable glycolysis inhibitors is urgently needed to manage diseases where glycolysis is preferred for disease progression. No glycolysis inhibitor exists which can be tracked and packaged in a delivery vehicle for efficient targeted deployment. Here, we report synthesis, characterization, and formulation of an all-in-one glycolysis inhibitor and document the therapeutic potential along with trackability and glycolysis inhibition of this inhibitor by utilizing an breast cancer model.