Discovery of ursolic acid prodrug (NX-201): Pharmacokinetics and in vivo antitumor effects in PANC-1 pancreatic cancer

The aim of our study was to develop ursolic acid (UA) prodrugs in order to overcome UA's weakness, which has an extremely low bioavailability. UA-medoxomil (NX-201), one of our UA prodrugs, showed an improved bioavailability about 200 times better than UA in rodent model. According to in vivo test performed with PANC-1 xenograft SCID mouse model, tumor growth rate decreased dose-dependently and 100 mg/kg dose of NX-201 had an anticancer effect comparable to gemcitabine. Most of all the combination of NX-201 (50 mg/kg, po, daily) and gemcitabine (40 mg/kg, iv, 2 times per week) even reduced tumor size after three weeks. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.