Nature<\/em>, which presented strategies to make five different types of glycomimetics.<\/p>\nThese glycomimetics are part of large and diverse libraries of altered sugars the pharmaceutical industry can draw upon to manufacture drugs, says the paper. The paper contains illustrations of a variety of molecular structures of modified sugars used in medicines to treat influenza, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and Alzheimer\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n
The North American research team concludes that their strategies to make these glycomimetics \u201cshould inspire new efforts in drug discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor drug development, you need to be able to access a library of these different sugar derivatives,\u201d says Dudding. \u201cYou might replace oxygen of a sugar with a carbon, nitrogen or sulphur, which will change its biological properties.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brock\u2019s contribution to the paper is rooted in two of the Dudding group\u2019s longtime specialties: understanding chemical reactivity; and an interest in incorporating fluorine for potential applications as drug cures and imaging agents.<\/p>\n
Dudding says the fluorine in altered sugars enables certain compounds to pass through barriers such as those caused by fats called lipids and to remain in the blood stream longer.<\/p>\n
Further, \u201cit attenuates and reduces degradation and oxidation processes in general,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom a medical standpoint, in drug development, fluorinated sugars could allow drugs to have a longer lifetime of action in the body or they\u2019ll bind tighter to a receptor to cause a desired process, so that\u2019s where they become useful,\u201d says Dudding.<\/p>\n
The Dudding group has worked on creating fluorinated molecules such as steroids and glycomimetics for many years, liaising with researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and other collaborators to do so.<\/p>\n
The research for the Nature<\/em> paper adds to the Dudding group\u2019s long-running project interest in developing potential imaging agents for radiolabeling, a technique that tracks radioactive molecules through the body.<\/p>\n\u201cIf somebody had a disease, you can see how that molecule is functioning,\u201d says Dudding. \u201cMaybe the disease causes the body not to metabolize a sugar correctly; we can see what\u2019s going wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dudding credits his students, particularly master\u2019s student Rozhin Rowshanpour, with advancing the group\u2019s research.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough Rohzin is one year away from earning her master\u2019s, the huge amount of work she did toward this publication, is in line with that one would expect to see from a graduating PhD as the major content of their dissertation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The line in the Mary Poppins song, \u201cJust a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down,\u201d may be true in some cases. But for Brock University Professor of Chemistry Travis Dudding, the sugar is the medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":73878,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3319,4052,55,41,5],"tags":[221,6654,48,7437,348,10690,10688,9285,3325,9206,10689,3580],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73880,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73877\/revisions\/73880"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}