No abstract

Starting from glutamic acid, different types of surfactants have been synthesised by using original trimodular strategies. Monosubstituted zwitterionic amides of glutamic acid obtained with excellent yields show good surface activity. The grafting of a second hydrophobic side-chain leads to bicatenar cationic surfactants or to disubstituted nonionic cyclic compounds. In order to reduce the hydrophobic character of the bicatenar surfactants, a second synthetic method has been developed, allowing the introduction of a polar sugar group into these molecules. The surfactant properties of several of the products have been determined by physico-chemical methods such as surface tension measurements and compression isotherm studies by means of a Langmuir balance.

Casein kinase 2 (CK2) is ubiquitous kinase protein emerging as a target for several human diseases including cancer. Several active CK2 inhibitors have been developed in the last few years; most of them have ATP-competitive type of inhibition, and only one inhibitor is in clinical trial as anticancer drug. Here we report on the synthesis of two derivatives of 2,6-diaryl-anthracene-9,10-dione, one of them, 2,6-di(furan-3-yl)anthracene-9,10-dione compound 3, turned out to be active towards CK2, and ATP competitive with an IC 50 value of 2.35 µM and a K i value of 1.26 µM. Molecular modeling studies indicated that unlike emodin, compound 3 was not able to perform a hydrogen bond with Lys68, although the compound fits well in the active site of human CK2α, which explains the difference in the measured affinity between those two compounds.