Carbohydrate-Based Drugs

Dear Colleagues,

Carbohydrates are one of the four major classes of biomolecules; they play important roles in various biological processes, including inflammation and immune response, angiogenesis and metastasis of cancer cells, viral and bacterial infections, and many other cell–cell communications. The tremendous effort made by glycoscientists in recent decades have allowed carbohydrate-based drugs to pave the way for an anonymous area of the therapeutic world.

Medicinal chemists use carbohydrates, particularly mono- and disaccharides, as valuable carriers or key substructures in order to improve the pharmaceutical phase, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of well-known drugs. Resorting to the prodrug strategy or multitarget drugs, the conjugation of a traditional drug to carbohydrates allows many limitations of the parent drug to be overcome, such as lack of site of action specificity, toxicity, chemical instability. Additionally, carbohydrate-based nanosystems have been shown to better deliver the starting drug or generate selective targeting towards specific body districts, as well as improve the cellular permeability and toxicological profile of the parent drug.

In this Special Issue, "Carbohydrate-Based Drugs", we aim to collect both original articles and up-to-date reviews that focus on the design, synthesis and biological evaluations of novel carbohydrate-based drugs, with a focus on carbohydrate-based prodrugs and nanosystems.

As Guest Editors, we encourage researchers working in this area to contribute their recent studies to this Special Issue of Pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Federica Sodano
Dr. Maria Grazia Rimoli
Guest Editors

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