Conspectus
Molecules containing carbohydrate
moieties play essential roles
in fighting a variety of bacterial and viral infections. Consequently,
the design of new carbohydrate-containing drugs or vaccines has attracted
great attention in recent years as means to target several infectious
diseases.
Conventional methods to produce these compounds face
numerous challenges
because their current production technology is based on chemical synthesis,
which often requires several steps and uses environmentally unfriendly
reactants, contaminant solvents, and inefficient protocols. The search
for sustainable processes such as the use of biocatalysts and eco-friendly
solvents is of vital importance. Therefore, their use in a variety
of reactions leading to the production of pharmaceuticals has increased
exponentially in the last years, fueled by recent advances in protein
engineering, enzyme directed evolution, combinatorial biosynthesis,
immobilization techniques, and flow biocatalysis. In glycochemistry
and glycobiology, enzymes belonging to the families of glycosidases,
glycosyltransferases (Gtfs), lipases, and, in the case of nucleoside
and nucleotide analogues, also nucleoside phosphorylases (NPs) are
the preferred choices as catalysts.
In this Account, on the
basis of our expertise, we will discuss
the recent biocatalytic and sustainable approaches that have been
employed to synthesize carbohydrate-based drugs, ranging from antiviral
nucleosides and nucleotides to antibiotics with antibacterial activity
and glycoconjugates such as neoglycoproteins (glycovaccines, GCVs)
and glycodendrimers that are considered as very promising tools against
viral and bacterial infections.
In the first section, we will
report the use of NPs and
N
-deoxyribosyltransferases
for the development of transglycosylation
processes aimed at the synthesis of nucleoside analogues with antiviral
activity. The use of deoxyribonucleoside kinases and hydrolases for
the modification of the sugar moiety of nucleosides has been widely
investigated.
Next, we will describe the results obtained using
enzymes for the
chemoenzymatic synthesis of glycoconjugates such as GCVs and glycodendrimers
with antibacterial and antiviral activity. In this context, the search
for efficient enzymatic syntheses represents an excellent strategy
to produce structure-defined antigenic or immunogenic oligosaccharide
analogues with high purity. Lipases, glycosidases, and Gtfs have been
used for their preparation.
Interestingly, many authors have
proposed the use Gtfs originating
from the biosynthesis of natural glycosylated antibiotics such as
glycopeptides, macrolides, and aminoglycosides. These have been used
in the chemoenzymatic semisynthesis of novel antibiotic derivatives
by modification of the sugar moiety linked to their complex scaffold.
These contributions will be described in the last section of this
review because of their relevance in the fight against the spreading
ph...