Cyclization-activated Prodrugs

Many drugs suffer from an extensive first-pass metabolism leading to druginactivation and/or production of toxic metabolites, which makes them attractive targets forprodrug design. The classical prodrug approach, which involves enzyme-sensitive covalentlinkage between the parent drug and a carrier moiety, is a well established strategy toovercome bioavailability/toxicity issues. However, the development of prodrugs that canregenerate the parent drug through non-enzymatic pathways has emerged as an alternativeapproach in which prodrug activation is not influenced by inter- and intraindividualvariability that affects enzymatic activity. Cyclization-activated prodrugs have beencapturing the attention of medicinal chemists since the middle-1980s, and reached maturityin prodrug design in the late 1990s. Many different strategies have been exploited in recentyears concerning the development of intramoleculary-activated prodrugs spanning fromanalgesics to anti-HIV therapeutic agents. Intramolecular pathways have also a key role intwo-step prodrug activation, where an initial enzymatic cleavage step is followed by acyclization-elimination reaction that releases the active drug. This wo