Repurposing old drugs to fight multidrug resistant cancers.
Overcoming multidrug resistance represents a major challenge for cancer treatment. In the search for new chemotherapeutics to treat malignant diseases, drug repurposing gained a tremendous interest during the past years. Repositioning candidates have often emerged through several stages of clinical drug development, and may even be marketed, thus attracting the attention and interest of pharmaceutical companies as well as regulatory agencies. Typically, drug repositioning has been serendipitous, using undesired side effects of small molecule drugs to exploit new disease indications. As bioinformatics gain increasing popularity as an integral component of drug discovery, more rational approa…
Biological Profiling of Semisynthetic C19-Functionalized Ferruginol and Sugiol Analogues
[EN] The abietane-type diterpenoids are significant bioactive compounds exhibiting a varied range of pharmacological properties. In this study, the first synthesis and biological investigation of the new abietane-diterpenoid (+)-4-epi-liquiditerpenoid acid (8a) together with several of its analogs are reported. The compounds were generated from the readily available methyl callitrisate (7), which was obtained from callitrisic acid present in Moroccan Sandarac resin. A biological evaluation was conducted to determine the effects of the different functional groups present in these molecules, providing basic structure-activity relationship (SAR) elements. In particular, the ferruginol and sugi…
Synthesis of polyfluoroalkyl sp2-iminosugar glycolipids and evaluation of their immunomodulatory properties towards anti-tumor, anti-leishmanial and anti-inflammatory therapies
Immunomodulatory glycolipids, among which α-galactosylceramide (KRN7000) is an iconic example, have shown strong therapeutic potential in a variety of conditions ranging from cancer and infection to autoimmune or neurodegenerative diseases. A main difficulty for those channels is that they often provoke a cytokine storm comprising both pro- and anti-inflammatory mediators that antagonize each other and negatively affect the immune response. The synthesis of analogues with narrower cytokine secretion-inducing capabilities is hampered by the intrinsic difficulty at controlling the stereochemical outcome in glycosidation reactions, particularly if targeting the α-anomer, which seriously hamper…