Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 22, Issue 12, 2016

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), which primarily affects the respiratory tract. Combinations of drugs are used for therapeutic synergism and to prevent the emergence of drug resistant strains, but even first- or secondchoice drugs present some disadvantages, such as significant side effects and the need for long duration of treatments. Thus, new strategies for TB control and treatment are highly demanded. In this context, protein tyrosine phosphatases (PtpA and PtpB) are secreted by Mtb within the host macrophage and they have been shown to contribute to Mtb pathogenicity. The understanding of the role of these PTPs has led to interesting anti-TB drugs discovery. Here, we review the current knowledge on these two proteins as targets for novel anti-TB therapies, with particular emphasis on their mechanism of action and current advancements in developing small molecule inhibitors from natural sources.

Carbonic anhydrases (CAs, EC 4.2.1.1) catalyze the fundamental reaction of CO2 hydration in all living organisms, being actively involved in the regulation of a plethora of patho/physiological processes. They represent a typical example of enzyme convergent evolution, as six genetically unrelated families of such enzymes were described so far. It is more than 70 years that synthetic compounds, mainly sulfonamides, have been used in clinical practice as diuretics and systemic acting antiglaucoma drugs. Recent studies using natural product libraries and isolated constituents from natural sources (such as fungi and plants) have disclosed novel chemotypes possessing carbonic anhydrase inhibition activities. These natural sources offer new opportunities in the search for new and more effective carbonic anhydrase inhibitors, and may serve as new leads for the design and development of future drugs. This review will discuss the most recent advances in the search of naturally occurring products and their synthetic derivatives that inhibit the CAs and their mechanisms of action at molecular level. Plant extracts are not considered in the present review.

Enzymatically controlled transfer of saccharide moieties constitutes a fundamental biological process, essential for both primary and secondary metabolism. Natural products, including countless glycosides, with a rich tradition of use in ethnopharmacology, remain a prime source of inspiration for medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology, but their availability from biological sources is usually scarce, hampering attempts at application for new drug discovery and development. Chemical glycosylation on the other hand, although continuously undergoing sophisticated mechanistic studies, has nevertheless already matured as a set of methods which are able to provide substantial amounts of pure chemical entities: natural glycosides, as well as their congeners and mimics, necessary for the study of biological activity in quality assurance systems and required for drug development by pharmaceutical regulations. The paper presents a review of natural products and their analogues glycosylation, in a set of arbitrary selected examples, supplemented with comments on general advances in chemical glycosylation methodology and their applicability for particular categories of secondary metabolites.

We present a selection of elegant and diverse biomimetic syntheses of complex natural product dimers. The dimerisation pathways discussed encompass the most prevalent strategies, including: Diels-Alder, Aldol, Mannich, conjugate addition, oxidative, radical and photochemical approaches; each underpinned through rational biosynthetic speculation.

The natural steroidal alkaloid cyclopamine has been identified as the first inhibitor of the Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway, which is implicated in embryonic development and tumorigenesis, as well as is hyperactivated in cancer stem cells (CSCs). The list of Hh-dependent tumors is steadily growing, and it has been estimated that about 25% of all cancer deaths show signs of aberrant Hh pathway activation. Notably, cyclopamine has been found to exert anticancer activity against several types of human cancer and to inhibit CSCs proliferation, thus highlighting the druggability of the Hh pathway and paving new opportunities in anticancer drug discovery. The aim of the present work is to review the main synthetic strategies to cyclopamine and its derivatives, with particular emphasis on the challenging chemical modifications aimed at improving the biological activity of the molecule.

Naturally occurring abietane diterpenoids have been studied over the years and have shown to display a wide range of biological activities. This review covers three main aspects of the abietane-type diterpenoids with hydroxy-p-quinone C ring, designated as royleanones. An overview of 1) the naturally occurrence, 2) chemical features and 3) the biological activities of this abietane group of compounds, including rearranged derivatives, is here explained. Likewise, hemisynthetic and total synthetic procedures to obtain royleanones will be reviewed. Thus, the chemistry of these bioactive compounds will be emphasized as well as their potential impact in the discovery of new macromolecular targets and novel therapeutic drugs. This review contains about 190 references covering the years from 1962 to 2014 on royleanone studies.

This review is aimed at providing an overview of the up-to-now published literature on resorc[4]arene macrocycles exploited as artificial receptors for the molecular recognition of some classes of natural products. A concise illustration of the main synthetic strategies developed to afford the resorc[4]arene scaffold is followed by a report on the principles of the gas-phase investigation of recognition phenomena by mass spectrometry (MS). Emphasis is placed on gas-phase studies of diastereoisomeric complexes generated inside a Fourier transform-ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometer by resorc[4]arene receptors towards a series of natural products, namely amino acids, amphetamine, ethanolamine neurotransmitters, dipeptides, vinca alkaloids and nucleosides. The literature outcomes discussed here, taken largely from our own revisited work, have been completed by references to other studies, in order to draw a broader picture of this rapidly evolving field of research.

Efficient control of the infectious diseases in the era of the emerging bacterial resistance demands consistent development of new antibiotic agents with novel modes of action. With some notable exceptions, the majority of the currently used antibiotics are natural product-derived compounds which were elaborated upon lead structures discovered by screening of various isolates. In this review, we summarized some selected examples of recent advances in the area of natural product based antibiotic development with particular emphasis on the synthetic and SAR-elucidation aspects.

The endocannabinoid system (ECS) is a group of neuromodulatory lipids and their receptors, which are widely distributed in mammalian tissues. ECS regulates various cardiovascular, nervous, and immune system functions inside cells. In recent years, there has been a growing body of evidence for the use of synthetic and natural cannabinoids as potential anticancer agents. For instance, the CB1 and CB2 receptors are assumed to play an important role inside the endocannabinoid system. These receptors are abundantly expressed in the brain and fatty tissue of the human body. Despite recent developments in molecular biology, there is still a lack of knowledge about the distribution of CB1 and CB2 receptors in the human kidney and their role in kidney cancer. To address this gap, we explore and demonstrate the role of the endocannabinoid system in renal cell carcinoma (RCC). In this brief overview, we elucidate the therapeutic aspects of the endocannabinoid system for various cancers and explain how this system can be used for treating kidney cancer. Overall, this review provides new insights into cannabinoids’ mechanisms of action in both in vivo and in vitro models, and focuses on recent discoveries in the field.

This review covers the chemical reactions, synthesis, and biological activities of tetracyclic diterpenoids including ent-kauranes, ent-beyeranes, ent-atisanes, ingenanes, tyglianes, stemodanes, stemaranes, sordarin, salvileucalin B, harringtonolide and hainanolidol. It comprises of the un-reviewed references from the year 2000.

Today, in spite of being older than a century (born in 1911), the Pictet-Spengler two component reaction (PS-2CR) is still one of the most popular reactions, not only for the synthesis of tetrahydroisoquinolines (THIQs), tetrahydro-β-carbolines (THBCs), or more complex structures containing these two privileged moieties, but also for the construction of novel scaffolds, available for structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies and/or for combinatorial libraries targeted at drug discovery. The prominence of the P-S cyclization is brought about by the inheritance from analogous enzyme-catalyzed reactions of the biogenetic pathways of natural products, mainly indole alkaloids, with a broad range of biological activities. This knowledge has been the starting point for the biomimetic synthesis or the bio-engineering production of pharmacologically important drugs. The long-lasting life of the P-S reaction depends on the discovery of its multiple facets, the modifications of its parameters and components, as well as the continuous renovation of solutions for the challenging stereochemical outcome of the transformation. This paper deals with an updated visit to the P-S reaction aiming to find the threads of the story without forgetting the numerous facets of the prism. It is organized as a theater piece, with a prologue and the main scene (namely, Act 1) where the readers can follow the parade of the two above-mentioned very recurring motifs (namely, THIQ and THBC) by moving from one step to another (a cyclization, an intramolecular attack, a stereoselective passage) to find the way out of the labyrinth of the P-S reaction.