Washington, August 22 (ANI): Sugars attached to drugs can enhance, change or neutralize their effects, a US scientist has said.
Jon Thorson, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy, an expert in the attachment and function of these sugars, said that understanding and controlling them has major potential for improving drugs, but that researchers have been stymied because many novel sugars are difficult to create and manipulate.
"The chemistry of these sugars is difficult, so we have been working on methods to make it more user friendly," he said.
Now, Thorson, graduate student Richard Gantt and postdoctoral fellow Pauline Peltier-Pain have described a simple process to separate the sugars from a carrier molecule, then attach them to a drug or other chemical.
The process also causes a colour change only among those molecules that have accepted the sugar. The change in colour should support a screening system that would easily select out transformed molecules for further testing.
The new molecules included 11 variants of vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic, each distinguished by the nature and number of attached sugars.
In a single test tube, the new technique is able to detach the sugar from its carrier and reattach it to the biological target molecule, Thorson says.
The transformed molecule, however, "suddenly becomes quite cytotoxic - it kills cells", he said.
"We don't know the mechanism, but there is some interest in using it to fight cancer because it seems to act specifically on certain cells," he added.
The study was recently published online in Nature Chemical Biology. (ANI)
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