Synthesis and antiproliferative activity of a natural like glycoconjugate polycyclic compound.

A natural like O-glycoconjugate polycyclic compound 4 was obtained by a multistep procedure starting from N-(3-methyl-1-(4-nitrophenyl)-1H-pyrazol-5-yl)acetamide. The glycosyl derivative 4 showed antiproliferative activity against all the tumoral cell lines of the NCI panel in the range 0.47-5.43 µM. Cytofluorimetric analysis performed on MDA-MB231, a very aggressive breast cancer cell line, which does not express estrogen, progesterone and HER-2/neu receptors, showed that 4 is able to induce prolonged cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase and morphological signs of differentiation. These events are correlated with down-regulation of both cyclin B1 and cdc2, the cyclins involved in G2/M transition, as well as up-regulation of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitor p21 Cip1/Waf1.

SENSASS NMR: New NMR techniques for enhancing the sensitivity and the spectral resolution of polymer supported chemicals.

The use of polyethylene glycols (PEGs) as organic polymer soluble supports for synthesis has been receiving growing interest. The main advantages of using PEGs as support are related to their non-toxicity, their commercial availability and their solubility properties allowing easy recovery and analysis of compounds linked to the polymer. The NMR characterization of PEG-branched products could however be difficult due to the presence of huge signals of the polymeric support. In order to overcome this problem, we developed new NMR experiments named SENSitivity increAsed and resolution enhanced by Signal Suppression or SENSASS NMR. These experiments implement either semi-selective pulses or Water Gate sequences for reducing signals of the polymer as well as fast pulsing techniques optimizing the recycling delay for enhancing the sensitivity of signals. They have been successfully implemented in classical NMR characterization experiments namely, COSY, HSQC and HMBC experiments.