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Molecular efficacy of radio- and chemotherapy sequences from direct DNA damage measurements

Abstract Purpose: To investigate the molecular aspects of the synergy between ionizing radiation and platinum (Pt) chemotherapeutic agents in cancer treatment with chemoradiation therapy (CRT) by measuring damages induced by low-energy electrons (LEE) to DNA bound to cisplatin. LEE are produced abundantly by any type of ionizing radiation and cisplatin represents a typical Pt-chemotherapeutic agents. Materials and methods: Our strategy involves two parallel administrations of cisplatin and irradiation with a 4.6 and 9.6 eV electron fluence of 1.1 × 1012: (1) LEE bombardment of supercoiled DNA and its subsequent reaction with cisplatin; (2) the reaction of DNA with cisplatin followed by LEE irradiation. The damage yields for the loss of supercoiled (LS), single-strand breaks (SSB) and double-strand breaks (DSB) were obtained from gel electrophoresis analysis. Base modifications were revealed by treating the samples with Escherichia coli base excision repair endonuclease (Nth and Fpg). Results: The yields were deduced from the respective time–response for the reaction of DNA with cisplatin. The results show that binding cisplatin to DNA followed by LEE irradiation, consistently yields more DNA damages than the reverse order. In comparison to non-treated DNA, administration (2) results in an increase of LS and SSB of 1.4–3.3 folds and of DSB by more than an order of magnitude. Furthermore, after enzyme treatment, the yields of DSB rise by factors of 5.3–15.4, indicating a large increase of clustered damages, which should at least partially translate into an increase of lethal damages in cancer cells during the CRT. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that a strong synergy between radiation and cisplatin can only be achieved at the molecular level, if the drug is present at the time of irradiation. Furthermore, this work confirms the LEE mechanism previously proposed to explain the synergy between radiation and Pt drugs in CRT. It involves chemical sensitization of DNA prior to irradiation, to facilitate strand breaks and clustered damages induced by the highly reactive LEE.