Natural or bio-inspired polyphenols in the synthesis of potential chemotherapeutic agents

Abstract

My doctoral research activity was focused mainly on natural or bioinspired polyphenols, aimed to the synthesis of new bioinspired compounds and to their evaluation as potential chemotherapeutic agents. More specifically, my research activity was devoted to lignans and neolignans, synthetized by chemical and/or enzimatic methodology. Hence, in particular, two polyphenol groups were studied, namely benzoxanthene lignans, their related phenazines and bisphenol neolignans; furthermore during the synthesis of magnolol-inspired neolignans, an unexpected dihydrobenzofuran neolignan was also obtained and characterized. The products have been studied in collaboration with others research team for the interaction with Gquadruplex DNA, as alpha-glucosidase inhibitors, as ABCG2 inhibitors, as agonist/antagonist of the Bile X receptors, antioxidant and antimicrobial agents. Further goal of this work was an inverse virtual screening focused on magnolol analogues, carried out during my short internship in the lab of prof. G. Bifulco (University of Salerno). In addition, the last part of my work was carried out at the University of Bordeaux, under the guidance of Prof. Stéphane Quideau, and was devoted to synthetic work on ellagitannins, an important subgroup of tannin family. In this context I gave a contribution to the total synthesis of vescalin and a vescalagin conjugate.