Advances in study of structural modification and antitumor activities of anthracyclines / 中国药学杂志

ABSTRACT

Anthracyclines generally possess antitumor activities and they are clinically broad-spectrum anticancer antibiotics. But some of them have prominent toxicities and drug resistances. These limit their further development and applications. However, proper structural modifications can sometimes solve these problems. So lots of new anthacyclines are obtained through total-synthesis or partial-synthesis for the purpose of finding more effective new drugs. In this paper, combing with our previous work and referring the literatures, we briefly introduce the mechanism, drug resistance, cardiac toxicity of anthracycline, and mainly review the structure-activity relationships of ring A, sugar moieties and twin drugs of anthracyclines. These can provide powerful evidence for further developments of new anthracyclines.