The importance of this project is underscored by the problem of the current chemotherapy treatments that are either highly inefficient or toxic, which weakens the immune system allowing opportunistic bacteria to infect the cancer patients. One way to address this problem is to design and synthesize more effective and less toxic compounds with both antibacterial and anticancer properties. Among the compounds that are being evaluated as anticancer agents, curcumin has demonstrated to have this property.  Although preclinical and clinical studies have shown that curcumin is not toxic against normal human cells, several pharmacokinetics disadvantages, such as poor bioavailability, fast metabolism and requiring of repetitive oral doses, have been reported, which limits its pharmacological applications. However, curcumin is still an excellent compound for drug design and development based on the basis of its explicit bioactivities, non-toxicity, and easy synthesis. In order to find novel molecules with the potential to be used as anticancer drugs, we performed the synthesis of novel C5-curcumin-fatty acid conjugates in order to study their anticancer properties. We are particularly interested in synthesizing C5-curcumin-palmitic acid (C5-curc-PA) because our preliminary results support the hypothesis that the chemical linking of C5-curcumin and palmitic acid will increase its anticancer properties. Once the C5-curc-PA and other conjugates were synthesized, their anticancer properties were evaluated by using standard in vitro bioassays. Finally, the inhibitory properties of C5-curc-FA conjugate toward human DNA topoisomerase I was addressed because this enzyme is a known molecular target of anticancer drugs.

Synthesis of novel c5-curcumin-fatty acid conjugates and evaluation of their anticancer properties

247th National Meeting (2014)

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