Morphine 6-glucuronide, but not morphine 3-glucuronide, is a highly potent opiate receptor agonist. In fact, there is converging evidence that much of the analgesic effect occurring after morphine treatment in humans is due to this metabolite rather than to the parent drug. Yet glucuronides as a rule are considered as highly polar metabolites unable to cross the blood-brain barrier and rapidly excreted by the urinary and/or biliary routes. Here, we report that morphine 6-glucuronide, and to a lesser extent morphine 3-glucuronide, are far more lipophilic than predicted, and in fact not much less lipophilic than morphine itself. Force-field and quantum mechanical calculations indicate that the two glucuronides can exist in conformational equilibrium between extended and folded forms. The extended conformers, because they efficiently expose their polar groups, must be highly hydrophilic forms predominating in polar media such as water; in contrast, the folded conformers mask part of their polar groups, thus being more lipophilic and likely to predominate in media of low polarity such as biological membranes.

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The predicted models for the structures and mode of hormone binding of the glycoprotein hormone receptors are to a large extent consistent with currently available biochemical and mutational data. Repeated sequences in beta-barrel proteins are shown to have general implications for constraints on structure. Averaging techniques used here to recognize the structural motif in these receptors should also apply to other proteins with repeated sequences.

Using the five therapeutic oxicams 1-5, we showed that isosteric replacements result in remarkable changes in the physicochemical and structural properties of congeners. Thus, the acidity of the phenolic OH group is relatively higher in the oxicams containing a pyridinyl moiety, i.e. in piroxicam (l), tenoxicam (2), and lornoxicam (3), due to their zwitterionic nature. This consequently influences their lipophilicity profile at different ionization states. Furthermore, partitioning behaviour in octan-1 -ol/H,O and heptane/H,O systems suggests an internal H-bond between the enolic OH and the amide C=O group. The anionic oxicams readily partition into the octanol phase at pH 7.4 and not at all into the heptane phase. Only the partition coefficients of oxicams measured in the heptane/H20 system, but not in the octanol/H20 system, correlate with their transfer across the blood-brain barrier. This implies that only the neutral form of oxicams crosses the blood-brain barrier.