MMAD

MMAD is a highly potent inhibitor of tubulin [1].

MMAD is one of the auristatins, which are used as the drugs of antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). In ADCs, the therapeutic compounds and the high selectivity of antibodies are combined by the linkers. By taking advantage of antigen-selectivity of MAbs, it can deliver these cytotoxic drugs to antigen-expressing tumor cells, thus increasing both the efficacy and safety of therapy. As a payload of ADCs, MMAD is used to target the tubulin of the tumor cells. It can interfere with tubulin polymerization and induce rapid cell death at low picomolar concentrations [1].

Additionally, MMAD is reported to be used in the production of site-specific antibody drug conjugates (NDCs). In the NDCs, MMAD is combined with anti-5T4 antibody or anti-Her2 antibody. It is shown that the NDCs demonstrate better efficacy and pharmacokinetics [2].

References:
[1] Puja Sapra, Andrea T Hooper, Christopher J, O’Donnell & Hans-Peter Gerber. Investigational antibody drug conjugates for solid tumors. Expert Opin. Investig. Drugs. 2011, 20(8):1131-1149.
[2] Feng Tiana, Yingchun Lu, Anthony Manibusan, Aaron Sellers et al. A general approach to site-specific antibody drug conjugates. PNAS. 2014, February, 111(5): 1766-1771.

MMAD: microarray microdissection with analysis of differences is a computational tool for deconvoluting cell type-specific contributions from tissue samples.[Pubmed:24085566]

Bioinformatics. 2014 Mar 1;30(5):682-9.

BACKGROUND: One of the significant obstacles in the development of clinically relevant microarray-derived biomarkers and classifiers is tissue heterogeneity. Physical cell separation techniques, such as cell sorting and laser-capture microdissection, can enrich samples for cell types of interest, but are costly, labor intensive and can limit investigation of important interactions between different cell types. RESULTS: We developed a new computational approach, called microarray microdissection with analysis of differences (MMAD), which performs microdissection in silico. Notably, MMAD (i) allows for simultaneous estimation of cell fractions and gene expression profiles of contributing cell types, (ii) adjusts for microarray normalization bias, (iii) uses the corrected Akaike information criterion during model optimization to minimize overfitting and (iv) provides mechanisms for comparing gene expression and cell fractions between samples in different classes. Computational microdissection of simulated and experimental tissue mixture datasets showed tight correlations between predicted and measured gene expression of pure tissues as well as tight correlations between reported and estimated cell fraction for each of the individual cell types. In simulation studies, MMAD showed superior ability to detect differentially expressed genes in mixed tissue samples when compared with standard metrics, including both significance analysis of microarrays and cell type-specific significance analysis of microarrays. CONCLUSIONS: We have developed a new computational tool called MMAD, which is capable of performing robust tissue microdissection in silico, and which can improve the detection of differentially expressed genes. MMAD software as implemented in MATLAB is publically available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/MMAD/.