ANTHRACYCLINES GELS: CHEMICAL STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONAL BEHAVIOUR

摘要

Anthracyclines are a family of antibiotics often used in cancer chemotherapy. Daunorubicin (DA) was the first isolated from a strain of Streptomyces peucetius back in 1960 and still in use for the treatment of several malignancies together with the even more frequently used analogue Doxorubicin (DX, also called Adriamycin) and its semisynthetic derivative Epirubicyn (EPI). Despite their extremely close chemical formula (Figure 1), their properties when in solution are enormously different. In fact, whereas the increase of the ionic strength induces the formation of a gel with DX, in the case of the related EPI and DA molecules what is observed are only the well-known self-association phenomena documented in the literature from decades4.