Design and synthesis of functionalized glycomers as non-peptidic ligands for SH2 binding and as inhibitors of A-431 human epidermoid and HT-29 colon carcinoma cell lines

Carbohydrates as scaffolds in drug discovery

Drug discovery has long suffered from the difficulty of having to place pharmacophoric groups in just the right spatial arrangement to elicit the desired biological response. Although some molecule classes have been discovered that seem to be privileged structures for at least some drug-receptor interactions, there remains the challenge to design and synthesize molecules with high specific affinity to pharmacologically important targets. With their high density of stereochemical information and their relative rigidity, carbohydrates provide excellent platforms upon which to display a number of substituents in a sterically defined way, hence offering the opportunity to harness their unique features for the drug-discovery process. This review highlights the progress that has been made in the development of carbohydrate scaffolds for drug discovery.

Molecular diversity through sugar scaffolds

Monosaccharides provide an excellent platform to tailor molecular diversity by appending desired substituents at selected positions around the sugar scaffold. The presence of five functionalized and stereo-controlled centres on the sugar scaffolds gives the chemist plenty of scope to custom design molecules to a pharmacophore model. This review focuses on the peptidomimetic developments in this area, as well as the concept of tailoring structural and functional diversity in a library using carbohydrate scaffolds and how this can lead to increased hit rates and rapid identification of leads, which has promising prospects for drug development.

Design, synthesis and preliminary biological evaluation of a focused combinatorial library of stereodiverse carbohydrate-scaffold-based peptidomimetics

A focused combinatorial library of 126 mimetics of the RGD sequence based on sugar scaffolds have been rationally constructed using molecular modeling, with a particular emphasis on the stereodiversity of the library. A liquid phase, mix and divide synthesis was used, active compounds being identified by using orthogonal libraries and recursive deconvolution strategies.