Drug Delivery

Method to Produce Septanose Oligosaccharides which Show Promise in Drug Delivery

Application

Method that efficiently produces septanose oligosaccharides.

Key Benefits

Septanose oligosaccharides may have interesting activity as biocompatible materials and could serve as drug delivery agents.

Technical Summary

Seven-membered ring (septanose) oligosaccharides are unknown in nature, since natural sugars have a thermodynamic preference of five- and six-membered rings. They are homologs of pyranoses and their similarity to natural carbohydrates suggests that they should have interesting and potentially useful physical, chemical, and biological properties. Emory investigators have developed novel methods of efficiently synthesizing these structures using a novel intermediate.

Septanose oligosaccharides may have interesting activity as biocompatible materials, complementary to but different from naturally occurring glycans such as cellulose and starch and could serve as drug delivery agents since biocompatibility of these compounds will be quite high, as potential enzymatic or non-enzymatic glycosidic hydrolysis will yield the biologically innocuous hexose sugar. They may also be introduced to other glycoconjugates as a mimic or structural analog of a naturally occurring carbohydrate substructure in carbohydrate-based drugs or vaccines.