Inhibition of Kallikrein-related peptidases 7 restrains pancreatic tumor growth through induction of ferroptosis

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive and lethal malignancies with extremely poor prognosis, and KLK7 was considered as a potential therapeutic target. In this study, we analyzed the expression of KLK7 in TCGA and GTEx databases and found that KLK7 had a negative correlation to long-term survival rate (>1.5 years) of pancreatic cancer patients. Compound 42 is a coumarinic derivative, a suicide substrate inhibitor of KLK7, which has been proved to inhibit the proliferation of PANC-1 cells in vitro effectively in our previous study. In this study, we further investigated the inhibition ability of Compound 42 in tumor formation and development in CDX and PDX tumor models of pancreatic cancer subsequently. Besides, we studied the inhibitory mechanism of Compound 42 and the result showed that Compound 42 arrested the pancreatic cancer cell cycle in G0/G1 phase and induced ferroptosis through down-regulation of GPX4 protein level and accumulation of iron ion. Thus, these experiments demonstrate that Compound 42, suppressing pancreatic cancer in vivo, is expected to become a novel drug for pancreatic cancer treatment.