Pharmacologically inhibiting phosphoglycerate kinase 1 for glioma with NG52

Inhibition of glycolysis process has been an attractive approach for cancer treatment due to the evidence that tumor cells are more dependent on glycolysis rather than oxidative phosphorylation pathway. Preliminary evidence shows that inhibition of phosphoglycerate kinase 1 (PGK1) kinase activity would reverse the Warburg effect and make tumor cells lose the metabolic advantage for fueling the proliferation through restoration of the pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) activity and subsequently promotion of pyruvic acid to enter the Krebs cycle in glioma. However, due to the lack of small molecule inhibitors of PGK1 kinase activity to treat glioma, whether PGK1 could be a therapeutic target of glioma has not been pharmacologically verified yet. In this study we developed a high-throughput screening and discovered that NG52, previously known as a yeast cell cycle-regulating kinase inhibitor, could inhibit the kinase activity of PGK1 (the IC₅₀ = 2.5 ± 0.2 μM). We showed that NG52 dose-dependently inhibited the proliferation of glioma U87 and U251 cell lines with IC₅₀ values of 7.8 ± 1.1 and 5.2 ± 0.2 μM, respectively, meanwhile it potently inhibited the proliferation of primary glioma cells. We further revealed that NG52 (12.5–50 μM) effectively inhibited the phosphorylation of PDHK1 at Thr338 site and the phosphorylation of PDH at Ser293 site in U87 and U251 cells, resulting in more pyruvic acid entering the Krebs cycle with increased production of ATP and ROS. Therefore, NG52 could reverse the Warburg effect by inhibiting PGK1 kinase activity, and switched cellular glucose metabolism from anaerobic mode to aerobic mode. In nude mice bearing patient-derived glioma xenograft, oral administration of NG52 (50, 100, 150 mg· kg⁻¹·d⁻¹, for 13 days) dose-dependently suppressed the growth of glioma xenograft. Together, our results demonstrate that targeting PGK1 kinase activity might be a potential strategy for glioma treatment.