New aplysiatoxin derivatives from the Okinawan cyanobacterium Moorea producens

The marine cyanobacterium Moorea producens is a rich source of diverse compounds that possess a variety of biological activities. In the present study, eight new aplysiatoxin derivatives, namely 6, 8–13, and 15, along with aplysiatoxin (1), debromoaplysiatoxin (2), 3-methoxyaplysiatoxin (3), anhydroaplysiatoxin (4), anhydrodebromoaplysiatoxin (5), oscillatoxin B2 (7), and 30-methyloscillatoxin D (14) were isolated and identified from the Okinawan M. producens. In cytotoxicity and diatom growth inhibition tests, the fifteen compounds tested (1–15) showed moderate or no activity at a concentration of 10?μg/mL.     

Improved and large-scale synthesis of 10-methyl-aplog-1, a potential lead for an anticancer drug

10-Methyl-aplog-1 (1), a simplified analog of tumor-promoting aplysiatoxin, is a potential lead for cancer therapy that exhibits marked and selective growth inhibitory effects against several human cancer cell lines and negligible tumor-promoting activity in vivo. However, more detailed evaluations of its toxicity and anticancer activity in vivo are hampered by supply problems associated with a non-optimal synthetic method. We here addressed this issue through a more practical and reliable synthetic method that afforded several hundred milligrams of 1 with high purity (>98%) in 23 steps from commercially available m-hydroxycinnamic acid with an overall yield of 1.1%. The utilization of two key reactions, substrate-controlled epoxidation and the oxidative cleavage of alkene with a free hydroxyl group, successfully reduced the existing five synthetic steps and markedly improved the handling of large amounts of intermediates. We also demonstrated for the first time that such an analog was synthetically accessible in reliable quantities and also that this large supply could advance in vivo trials for the treatment of cancer.