Quest for steroidomimetics: Amino acids derived steroidal and nonsteroidal architectures

Abstract

The chiral pool amino acids have been utilized for the construction of steroidal and non-steroidal architectures in the quest for steroidomimetics. Chirality derived from amino acid-based architectures provides new and easy to incorporate chiral chemical space, which is otherwise very difficult to introduce and comprised of several synthetic steps for asymmetric steroids. The different and exciting ligand-receptor interactions may arise from the use of each amino acid enantiomer that was introduced into the chiral steroidal backbone. The A and D rings of steroidal architectures can be mimicked by the phenyl group of the amino acid tyrosine. The Mitsunobu reaction, nucleophilic substitution and elimination, etc. were utilized for constructing diverse tri- and tetracyclic steroidal skeletons as well as benzofused seco-steroids from amino acids. These benzofused, amino acid-derived steroidal and nonsteroidal molecules had promising biological activity in hormonal related disorders.

Keywords: Chiral amino acid; Nonsteroidal; Seco-steroids; Steroidal; Steroidomimetics.