scholarly journals Sulfated Non-Saccharide Glycosaminoglycan Mimetics as Novel Drug Discovery Platform for Various Pathologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (21) ◽  
pp. 3412-3447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Afosah ◽  
Rami A. Al-Horani

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are very complex, natural anionic polysaccharides. They are polymers of repeating disaccharide units of uronic acid and hexosamine residues. Owing to their template-free, spatiotemporally-controlled, and enzyme-mediated biosyntheses, GAGs possess enormous polydispersity, heterogeneity, and structural diversity which often translate into multiple biological roles. It is well documented that GAGs contribute to physiological and pathological processes by binding to proteins including serine proteases, serpins, chemokines, growth factors, and microbial proteins. Despite advances in the GAG field, the GAG-protein interface remains largely unexploited by drug discovery programs. Thus, Non-Saccharide Glycosaminoglycan Mimetics (NSGMs) have been rationally developed as a novel class of sulfated molecules that modulate GAG-protein interface to promote various biological outcomes of substantial benefit to human health. In this review, we describe the chemical, biochemical, and pharmacological aspects of recently reported NSGMs and highlight their therapeutic potentials as structurally and mechanistically novel anti-coagulants, anti-cancer agents, anti-emphysema agents, and anti-viral agents. We also describe the challenges that complicate their advancement and describe ongoing efforts to overcome these challenges with the aim of advancing the novel platform of NSGMs to clinical use.

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 1102-1116
Author(s):  
Sudip Kumar Mandal ◽  
Utsab Debnath ◽  
Amresh Kumar ◽  
Sabu Thomas ◽  
Subhash Chandra Mandal ◽  
...  

Background and Introduction: Sesquiterpene lactones are a class of secondary metabolite that contains sesquiterpenoids and lactone ring as pharmacophore moiety. A large group of bioactive secondary metabolites such as phytopharmaceuticals belong to this category. From the Asteraceae family-based medicinal plants, more than 5,000 sesquiterpene lactones have been reported so far. Sesquiterpene lactone-based pharmacophore moieties hold promise for broad-spectrum biological activities against cancer, inflammation, parasitic, bacterial, fungal, viral infection and other functional disorders. Moreover, these moiety based phytocompounds have been highlighted with a new dimension in the natural drug discovery program worldwide after the 2015 Medicine Nobel Prize achieved by the Artemisinin researchers. Objective: These bitter substances often contain an α, β-unsaturated-γ-lactone as a major structural backbone, which in recent studies has been explored to be associated with anti-tumor, cytotoxic, and anti-inflammatory action. Recently, the use of sesquiterpene lactones as phytomedicine has been increased. This study will review the prospect of sesquiterpene lactones against inflammation and cancer. Methods: Hence, we emphasized on the different features of this moiety by incorporating its structural diversity on biological activities to explore structure-activity relationships (SAR) against inflammation and cancer. Results: How the dual mode of action such as anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer has been exhibitedby these phytopharmaceuticals will be forecasted in this study. Furthermore, the correlation of anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activity executed by the sesquiterpene lactones for fruitful phytotherapy will also be revealed in the present review in the milieu of pharmacophore activity relation and pharmacodynamics study as well. Conclusion: So, these metabolites are paramount in phytopharmacological aspects. The present discussion on the future prospect of this moiety based on the reported literature could be a guide for anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer drug discovery programs for the upcoming researchers.


Proceedings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Yun Shi ◽  
Mark von Itzstein

Fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) has become a major strategy to derive novel lead candidates for both new and established therapeutic targets, as it promises efficient exploration of chemical space by employing fragment-sized (MW 300) compounds. One of the first challenges in implementing a FBDD approach is the design of a fragment library, and more specifically, the choice of its size and individual members. In order to construct a library that maximises the chances of discovering novel chemical matter, a large number of fragments with sufficient structural diversity are often sought. However, the exact diversity of a certain collection of fragments remains elusive, which hinders direct comparisons among different selections of fragments. Building upon structural fingerprints that are commonly utilised in cheminformatics, we herein introduced quantitative measures for the structural diversity of fragment libraries. Structures of commercially available fragments were retrieved from the ZINC database and filtered by physicochemical properties, after which they were subject to selections with library sizes ranging from 100 to 100,000 compounds. The selected libraries were evaluated and compared quantitatively, resulting in interesting size-diversity relationships. Our results suggested the existence of an optimal size for structural diversity and demonstrated that such quantitative measures can guide the design of diverse fragment libraries under various circumstances


Author(s):  
S. SATHESH KUMAR ◽  
P. SHANMUGASUNDARAM ◽  
M. KOMALA ◽  
B. BHARGAVI ◽  
J. PADMAVATHY

Among the natural sources, plant origin drugs constitute around 25% which includes various secondary metabolites such as bioflavonoids, alkaloids, terpenes, saponins, glucosides, and lignans. The bioflavonoids belonging to the polyphenol group shows many beneficial effects like hepatoprotective, antioxidant, antibacterial, anticancer, anti-inflammatory and antiviral. The main objective of this article is to collectively present the research data published worldwide about the anticancer activity of bioflavonoids by loading them in novel formulations. Thus, the present review explored the novel formulations of the bioflavonoids with improved pharmacokinetic properties along with the enhanced anticancer activity. The major drawback with bioflavonoids is its poor solubility and bioavailability, which restricts the usage of bioflavonoids in the treatment of cancer in the market worldwide. Novel drug delivery system seems to possess many benefits like site-specific drug delivery along with minimal side effects and improves pharmaceutical and therapeutic properties of drugs compared to a conventional dosage form of bioflavonoids. The scope for improvement of anticancer activity of bioflavonoids by incorporating in novel pharmaceutical formulations like nanoparticles is very high, and it has to be considered as a potential area of research.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Kyle Catapang ◽  
Junie B. Billones

SARS-CoV-2 has no known vaccine nor any effective treatment that has been released for clinical trials yet. This has ultimately paved the way for novel drug discovery approaches since although there are multiple efforts focused on drug repurposing of clinically-approved drugs for SARS-CoV-2, it is also worth considering that these existing drugs can be surpassed in effectivity by novel ones. This research focuses on the generation of novel candidate inhibitors via constrained graph variational autoencoders and the calculation of their Tanimoto similarities against existing drugs---repurposing these existing drugs and considering the novel ligands as possible SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors and ACE2 receptor blockers by docking them through PyRx and ranking these ligands.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaofeng Li ◽  
Xiaoxu Li ◽  
Yinghong Li ◽  
Chunyan Yu ◽  
Weiwei Xue ◽  
...  

Background:Despite the substantial contribution of natural products to the FDA drug approval list, the discovery of anti-cancer drugs from the huge amount of species on the planet remains looking for a needle in a haystack. Objective: Drug-productive clusters in the phylogenetic tree are thus proposed to narrow the searching scope by focusing on much smaller amount of species within each cluster, which enable prioritized and rational bioprospecting for novel drug-like scaffolds. However, the way anti-cancer nature-derived drugs distribute in phylogenetic tree has not been reported, and it is oversimplified to just focus anti-cancer drug discovery on the drug-productive clusters, since the number of species in each cluster remains too large to be managed.Objective:Drug-productive clusters in the phylogenetic tree are thus proposed to narrow the searching scope by focusing on much smaller amount of species within each cluster, which enable prioritized and rational bioprospecting for novel drug-like scaffolds. However, the way anti-cancer nature-derived drugs distribute in phylogenetic tree has not been reported, and it is oversimplified to just focus anti-cancer drug discovery on the drug-productive clusters, since the number of species in each cluster remains too large to be managed.Methods:In this study, 260 anti-cancer drugs approved in the past 70 years were comprehensively analyzed by hierarchical clustering of phylogenetic distribution.Results:207 out of these 260 drugs were derived from or inspired by the natural products isolated from 58 species. Phylogenetic distribution of those drugs further revealed that nature-derived anti-cancer drugs originated mostly from drug-productive families that tend to be clustered rather than scattered on the phylogenetic tree. Moreover, based on their productivity, drug-producing species were categorized into productive (CPS), newly emerging (CNS) and lessproductive (CLS). Statistical significances in druglikeness between drugs from CPS and CLS were observed, and drugs from CNS were found to share similar drug-like properties to those from CPS.Conclusion:This finding indicated a great raise in drug approval standard, which suggested us to focus bioprospecting on the species yielding multiple drugs and keeping productive for long period of time.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Kyle Catapang ◽  
Junie B. Billones

SARS-CoV-2 has no known vaccine nor any effective treatment that has been released for clinical trials yet. This has ultimately paved the way for novel drug discovery approaches since although there are multiple efforts focused on drug repurposing of clinically-approved drugs for SARS-CoV-2, it is also worth considering that these existing drugs can be surpassed in effectivity by novel ones. This research focuses on the generation of novel candidate inhibitors via constrained graph variational autoencoders and the calculation of their Tanimoto similarities against existing drugs---repurposing these existing drugs and considering the novel ligands as possible SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors and ACE2 receptor blockers by docking them through PyRx and ranking these ligands. Additionally, this research has successfully generated three novel ligands for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease and four novel ligands for the ACE2 receptor.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Kyle Catapang ◽  
Junie B. Billones

SARS-CoV-2 has no known vaccine nor any effective treatment that has been released for clinical trials yet. This has ultimately paved the way for novel drug discovery approaches since although there are multiple efforts focused on drug repurposing of clinically-approved drugs for SARS-CoV-2, it is also worth considering that these existing drugs can be surpassed in effectivity by novel ones. This research focuses on the generation of novel candidate inhibitors via constrained graph variational autoencoders and the calculation of their Tanimoto similarities against existing drugs---repurposing these existing drugs and considering the novel ligands as possible SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors and ACE2 receptor blockers by docking them through PyRx and ranking these ligands. Additionally, this research has successfully generated three novel ligands for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease and four novel ligands for the ACE2 receptor.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Kyle Catapang ◽  
Junie B. Billones

SARS-CoV-2 has no known vaccine nor any effective treatment that has been released for clinical trials yet. This has ultimately paved the way for novel drug discovery approaches since although there are multiple efforts focused on drug repurposing of clinically-approved drugs for SARS-CoV-2, it is also worth considering that these existing drugs can be surpassed in effectivity by novel ones. This research focuses on the generation of novel candidate inhibitors via constrained graph variational autoencoders and the calculation of their Tanimoto similarities against existing drugs---repurposing these existing drugs and considering the novel ligands as possible SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors and ACE2 receptor blockers by docking them through PyRx and ranking these ligands.


Author(s):  
Sagar T. Malsane ◽  
Smita S. Aher ◽  
R. B. Saudagar

Oral route is presently the gold standard in the pharmaceutical industry where it is regarded as the safest, most economical and most convenient method of drug delivery resulting in highest patient compliance. Over the past three decades, orally disintegrating tablets (FDTs) have gained considerable attention due to patient compliance. Usually, elderly people experience difficulty in swallowing the conventional dosage forms like tablets, capsules, solutions and suspensions because of tremors of extremities and dysphagia. In some cases such as motion sickness, sudden episodes of allergic attack or coughing, and an unavailability of water, swallowing conventional tablets may be difficult. One such problem can be solved in the novel drug delivery system by formulating “Fast dissolving tablets” (FDTs) which disintegrates or dissolves rapidly without water within few seconds in the mouth due to the action of superdisintegrant or maximizing pore structure in the formulation. The review describes the various formulation aspects, superdisintegrants employed and technologies developed for FDTs, along with various excipients, evaluation tests, marketed formulation and drugs used in this research area.


Author(s):  
Primali Navaratne ◽  
Jenny Wilkerson ◽  
Kavindri Ranasinghe ◽  
Evgeniya Semenova ◽  
Lance McMahon ◽  
...  

<div> <div> <div> <p>Phytocannabinoids, molecules isolated from cannabis, are gaining attention as promising leads in modern medicine, including pain management. Considering the urgent need for combating the opioid crisis, new directions for the design of cannabinoid-inspired analgesics are of immediate interest. In this regard, we have hypothesized that axially-chiral-cannabinols (ax-CBNs), unnatural (and unknown) isomers of cannabinol (CBN) may be valuable scaffolds for cannabinoid-inspired drug discovery. There are multiple reasons for thinking this: (a) ax-CBNs would have ground-state three-dimensionality akin to THC, a key bioactive component of cannabis, (b) ax-CBNs at their core structure are biaryl molecules, generally attractive platforms for pharmaceutical development due to their ease of functionalization and stability, and (c) atropisomerism with respect to phytocannabinoids is unexplored “chemical space.” Herein we report a scalable total synthesis of ax-CBNs, examine physical properties experimentally and computationally, and provide preliminary behavioral and analgesic analysis of the novel scaffolds. </p> </div> </div> </div>


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