Glycobiology and Drug Design

During the past several years, it has become increasingly clear that carbohydrates, which can be targeted to specific diseases, represent a whole new dimension in drug design. Characterized by a variety of terms - specific recognition, lectins, and molecular diversity, just to cite a few -this new dimension based on carbohydrates essentially has introduced a new language to chemistry, biochemistry, and related disciplines. Vocabulary has been building so fast, in fact, that most professional chemists (i.e., practitioners who are among the few who work in the area of carbohydrates)may sometimes feel a bit illiterate. This book will help them and many other scientists to better understand the current state of the art and the challenges that remain in successfully consummating matches of carbohydrate-based drugs and the deadly diseases they target. This book includes preclinical studies and clinical trials ofcarbohydrate-based drugs in progress as well as analyzing their delivery, biocompatibility, clearance, and metabolic pathways. Further, this book explores a number of other features of carbohydrate drugs and their targets, such as the structure of antibodies with unusually high-affinity forcarbohydrates, and protein-glycan interactions and their inhibitors. Galactomannans and thio-, imino-, nitro-, and aminosugars are particularly considered with respect to their structural and functional impacts. This volume will not only update existing publications on carbohydrate-based drug designbut also further shape the emerging data and thinking in this new area.