Cucurbiturils as Containers for Medicinal Compounds

摘要

The drug efficacy problem related to the stability of medicinal preparations and to the specificity of their action is now among the most important in pharmacology and medicine. One way to solve this problem is to create structures with the ability to encapsulate a therapeutic agent in order to release it over a given time at a particular site. Cucurbiturils are an example of such "host molecules."Encapsulation will allow us to increase the solubility of compounds, control the release of an agent and its cell-penetration mechanism,and alter the distribution of a medicine and its retention in the body; it can also improve its shelf-life stability and decrease the level of its degradation in vivo. Nevertheless, although they are well known as good complex formers, cucurbiturils remain underexplored. This review includes a description of the mechanism for the formation of cucurbituril complexes with different compounds and gives examples of the already created complexes with a variety of medicinal agents; it also outlines the problems associated with the further applications of cucurbiturils as medicinal compound carriers, pointing to the need for further studies in vivo and in vitro.