Anti-Cancer Agents in Medicinal Chemistry (Formerly Current Medicinal Chemistry - Anti-Cancer Agents) - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2008

The role of carbohydrates in tumour progression, metastasis and anti-tumour drug development is nowadays evident. It is now well known that oligosaccharides found on cell surfaces play key roles in many and diverse recognition and adhesion processes both in physiological and pathological states. In particular, changes in glycosylation are often encountered in disease states. In the past decade advances in geno Read More

It is becoming increasingly apparent that cell surface oligosaccharides play pivotal roles as recognition molecules in a range of cell communication and adhesion processes. Alterations in cellular glycosylation are also associated with diseases, including cancer, and may have functional significance. This paper gives an overview of the complex topic of cellular glycosylation mechanisms and reviews the well-documented a Read More

Lectins are a group of specific proteins that preferentially bind to carbohydrates inside and outside cells. To date, an increasing number of animal lectins have been found and categorized into several families in terms of the significant primary structural homology, while the classification is not always straightforward. These lectins can exert immense biological functions mainly through their specific carbohydrate-protein interact Read More

Cell surface glycoconjugates control a variety of biological events including cell differentiation, homing to specific tissues, cell adhesion, virus/cell recognition and immunological recognition. The heterogeneity and diversity of these molecules present a challenge to understanding both their functions and how those functions are encoded. Advances in biotechnology have led to new methods for genome and proteome study t Read More

A summary of spectroscopic methods for structural and conformational elucidation of bioactive carbohydrates based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is described. The formation of carbohydrate-protein complexes is often the initial step of biological responses. Therefore, knowledge about the structural factors that stabilize the complex may be relevant and contribute to predict the structural/ conformation Read More

Malignant tumor cells invade normal tissues in the vicinity of cancer through devastating the extracelluar matrix and blood vessel wall of the tissues. An important step in this process is degradation of heparan sulfate proteoglycan, a carbohydrate-protein complex. Heparan sulfate proteoglycan is a major component of the extracellular matrix, and is essential for the self-assembly, insolubility and barrier properties o Read More

Iminosugars, featuring a basic nitrogen at the hetero atom position in carbohydrate rings, gain increasing interest in the search for novel approaches towards cancer drug development. This compound class is known as competitive inhibitors of carbohydrate manipulation enzymes, such as glycosidases, which are involved in tumor cell invasion and migration. Such enzymes are also responsible for the attachment of Read More

The immune system recognizes and potentially eliminates tumors that express antigenic molecules. The theory of “cancer immunosurveillance”, describing lymphocytes as sentinels capable of recognizing nascent transformed cells and thus maintaining tissue homeostasis, has been proposed as far back as 50 years ago. The modern vision of immune responses against cancer is more complex because the immune system scul Read More

This review focuses on recent efforts in glycoconjugate construction for the creation and evaluation of vaccines based on carbohydrate cancer-associated antigens. This therapeutic approach takes advantage from the known tendency of transformed cells to express selective carbohydrate motifs otherwise hidden in normal cells. The immunological response is elicited by the association in the same molecule a carbohydrate, Read More