Design and Sythesis of New Breast Cancer Chemotherapeutic Agents

摘要

This project is directed towards the design and synthesis of new drugs to treat breast cancer. Several naturally occurring substances have recently been discovered that have the same biological activity as the very important anticancer drug Taxol. We are using both computational and synthetic approaches to determine the parts of these very different compounds that are important for their biological activity. The determination of these 'critical parts' could lead to the development of simpler structures that could be very powerful anticancer drugs. We have begun these studies by making new compounds based on a very promising taxol-like substance called epothilone. While the structures of the new compounds that we have prepared are very much like epothilone itself, we have not yet been able to prepare a simple structure with the same anticancer properties as taxol and epothilone. We are continuing our efforts to develop new anticancer drugs using this strategy.