Quinoline Alkaloids Against Neglected Tropical Diseases

Background: The quinoline moiety has been reported to be a privileged structure due to its presence in many drugs. It appears in alkaloids and natural products such as quinine, camptothecin or cinchonidine. The spectrum of the activity of quinoline-related compounds includes not only antimicrobial but also anticancer effects. Objective: Those active quinoline alkaloids have become the basis for a large number of synthetic drugs.Nowadays, more than a third of quinoline-derived drugs have a natural provenance. There are also a number of quinoline alkaloids that have been used extensively for treating neglected diseases in traditional medicine. Interestingly, most of the active plants predominantly populate countries that suffer most from such diseases. In this work, quinoline alkaloids that have an antimicrobial activity that might be relevant to neglected diseases are reviewed.