The current concept in searching for new bioactive products, including mainly original active substances with potential application in pharmacy and medicine, is based on compounds with a previously determined structure, well-known properties, and biological activity profile. Nowadays, many commonly used drugs originated from natural sources. Moreover, some natural materials have become the source of leading structures for processing further chemical modifications. Many organic compounds with great therapeutic significance have the nitro group in their structure. Very often, nitro compounds are active substances in many well-known preparations belonging to different groups of medicines that are classified according to their pharmacological potencies. Moreover, the nitro group is part of the chemical structure of veterinary drugs. In this review, we describe many bioactive substances with the nitro group, divided into ten categories, including substances with exciting activity and that are currently undergoing clinical trials.
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Triterpenes are a wide and important group of compounds that have several promising pharmacological
properties, such as hepatoprotective, anti-inflammatory, anti-HIV, antioxidant, or anticancer activities. Such potent
substances can be successfully incorporated in more complex chemical systems e.g. codrugs or pro-drugs that have better
pharmacological profile. The codrug is connected with a drug formation pathway to chemically cohere at least two drug
molecules to improve positive therapeutic efficiency or decrease side effects. The codrug can be cleaved in the organism to
generate effective compounds previously used as substrates. This article presents an overview of codrugs that consist of
pentacyclic triterpene moiety that is chosen as a basic codrug moiety due to their wide range of vital activities and another
drug molecule fragment. It was found that triterpenoid codrugs are characterized by a wide range of biological activities.
However, most of them have anticancer potency.
Traditional application of plant in folk medicine is a base for discovery of new active chemical substances. In the second half of 20th century, significant antitumor activity of extract from bark of the Yew tree was recognized. The compound that was responsible for this kind of properties has called taxol and had structure of diterpene with acyl groups. Low availability forced researchers to find different ways of taxol gaining. In the further years, many synthetic and semi-synthetic methods were developed. Nowadays, biotechnological methods with use of cell suspension cultures are introduced.
A series of N-substituted 2,4-dinitroimidazoles, 4,5-dinitroimidazoles, and 2-methyl-4,5-dinitroimidazoles have been selectively reduced to the corresponding aminonitroimidazole derivatives, using iron dust in glacial acetic acid at room temperature. 2,4-Dinitroimidazoles have been reduced to the 2-amino-4-nitro-derivatives only but 4,5-dinitroimidazoles have given 4-amino-5-nitro-or 5-amino-4-nitroderivatives depended on the structure of the N-substituent.
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