Biomedical Applications of Tetrazine Cycloadditions

Abstract

Disease mechanisms are increasingly being resolved at the molecular level. Biomedical success at this scale creates synthetic opportunities for combining specifically designed orthogonal reactions in applications such as imaging, diagnostics, and therapy. For practical reasons, it would be helpful if bioorthogonal coupling reactions proceeded with extremely rapid kinetics (k > 10³ M^–1 s^–1) and high specificity. Improving kinetics would minimize both the time and amount of labeling agent required to maintain high coupling yields. In this Account, we discuss our recent efforts to design extremely rapid bioorthogonal coupling reactions between tetrazines and strained alkenes. These selective reactions were first used to covalently couple conjugated tetrazine near-infrared-emitting fluorophores to dienophile-modifed extracellular proteins on living cancer cells. Confocal fluorescence microscopy demonstrated efficient and selective labeling, and control experiments showed minimal background fluorescence. Multistep techniques were optimized to work with nanomolar concentrations of labeling agent over a time scale of minutes: the result was successful real-time imaging of covalent modification. We subsequently discovered fluorogenic probes that increase in fluorescence intensity after the chemical reaction, leading to an improved signal-to-background ratio. Fluorogenic probes were used for intracellular imaging of dienophiles. We further developed strategies to react and image chemotherapeutics, such as trans-cyclooctene taxol analogues, inside living cells. Because the coupling partners are small molecules (18F. Additionally, recent work has applied this reaction directly in vivo for the pretargeted imaging of solid tumors. Future work with tetrazine cycloadditions will undoubtedly lead to optimized protocols, improved probes, and additional biomedical applications.