title: The Solid-Phase Combinatorial Synthesis of 2,6,9- Trisubstituted Purines as Potential Adenosine A3 Receptor Antagonists
Creators: name: McKeveney, Declan
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2005
Subjects: subject: Purines
subject: adenosine receptor antagonists
subject: 2
subject: 6
subject: 9-trisubstituted purines

description: Purines as a class of compounds have been implicated in many biological systems, including as adenosine receptor antagonists. A method of synthesising 2,6,9-trisubstituted purines would be useful to produce small libraries of compounds for probing adenosine receptor selectivity. A library of trisubstituted purines has been achieved using a solid-phase methodology. The electronic properties of the substrate were found to result in difficulties with the loading of substrate onto the resin. Theoretical calculations provided the basis for mono-substitution in order to activate the substrate. This modified substrate has loaded onto the resin in reproducible and high yields. Amine and thiol, on-resin, C-2 substitution was shown to proceed at room temperature. This represents significantly milder conditions than are generally seen in the literature. This is due to the activating effect of the carbamate linker chosen on the pyrimidine ring. This also results in a faster reaction rate than is seen in the corresponding solution-phase reaction. This study showed that the electronic profile of the loaded substrate was responsible for the low alkylation on the carbamate nitrogen of loaded dichloro- or C-6 substituted chloropyrimidines. This reaction was modified by activating the pyrimidine ring via C-2 substitution and has been shown to go to completion with three different alkyl groups to give a clean product direct from resin cleavage. On-resin nitro reduction had been planned. The resin bound product would then be carried on to the next step of resin cleavage and cyclisation of the imidazole ring to give the final purine products. On resin reduction could not be achieved, however, cleavage of the compound from the resin and reduction in solution was found to be efficient as the cyclisation reagents could be included in this step without interfering with yield or purity of products and so this represents a clear improvement upon the planned synthesis. Efforts to fully characterise the library brought up issues of purine NMR. Extremely broad signals were observed in the proton spectra of many of the compounds making assignments difficult. Broad 13C NMR signals have also been observed. Restricted rotation about the substituent N-C bond is responsible for these problems. Crystal structure data has confirmed the double bond character of this bond with one of the substituted pyrimidines. High temperature NMR experiments have demonstrated how this can be overcome and the fine structure of the spectra observed. HMBC and COSY correlations have been used alongside the 1H and 13C spectra to allow full characterisation of the compounds wherever possible. Receptor homology models were created and updated for all four adenosine receptor subtypes. Known adenosine agonists and antagonists were created and minimised for use in docking experiments. Receptor docking experimental data is reported. Binding assays are being carried out by a third party and will be submitted for publication at a later date. A small library of 2,6,9-trisubstituted purines has been synthesised, exemplifying an efficient and robust method to achieve pure compounds for biological evaluation. A good level of diversity has been achieved at each combinatorial position (two substitutions and an N-alkylation). Final compounds have been isolated in good yields with a high level of purity.