Graduation Year

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Granting Department

Chemistry

Major Professor

Mark L. McLaughlin

Committee Member

Jon Antilla

Committee Member

Jianfeng Cai

Committee Member

David L. Morse

Keywords

Fluorine Capture, Kinase Inhibitor, PET imaging, PET Probe, Triazines

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) is a tyrosine kinase receptor, which plays a pivotal part in the development of the central nervous system. Aberrant expression of full-length ALK occurs in neuroblastoma and chromosomal translocation or inversion of the ALK gene can generate novel fusion-ALK proteins that possess constitutive kinase activity and contribute to oncogenic processes. One of the well-studied fusion proteins is nucleophosmin (NPM-ALK), which draws a lot of attention for medicinal chemists to design small molecules as kinase inhibitors for this target. In this dissertation, [1, 2, 4]-Dihydrotriazine dimers as competitors of the lead compound NVP-TAE684 targeting NPM-ALK have been designed and synthesized. Molecular modelling studies show that those dihydrotriazine dimers have a great potential to be better kinase inhibitors.

Chapter two describes imaging in the drug discovery and development arena. One of important imaging techniques is positron emission tomography (PET). PET is a radionuclide based molecular imaging technique, which can be used for early detection, characterization, "real time" monitoring of diseases, and investigation of the efficacy of drugs. Fluorine-18 (18F) based molecular probes for PET imaging still remain big challenging to prepare but have gained increased interest by radiochemists in the past two decades. In this study, a novel approach to introduce fluorine into a molecular probe has been discovered based on boron chemistry. A few novel fluorine capture reagents have been synthesized and described in this Chapter.

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