Designing new analogs for streamlining the structure of cytotoxic lamellarin natural products.

Despite the therapeutic potential of marine-derived lamellarin natural products, their preclinical development has been hampered by their lipophilic nature, causing very poor aqueous solubility. In order to develop more drug-like analogs, their structure was streamlined in this study from both the cytotoxic activity and lipophilicity standpoints. First, a modified total synthetic route was successfully devised to construct a library of 59 systematically designed lamellarin analogs, which were then subjected to cytotoxicity and log P determinations.