Aporphine Alkaloids and their Antioxidant Medical Application: From Antineoplastic Agents to Motor Dysfunction Diseases

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in the modern medicine and the food industry is to provide with compounds that should have the property to be antioxidant that, proportionally, can be accompanied with pharmacological activities to be used in chronic clinical treatments. This means, compounds that can extend the shelf life of foods and drugs avoiding its decomposition by oxidation and, at the same time, to afford potent drugs against various diseases with minor side effects. Thus, aporphine alkaloids have been the group of nitrogen compounds more studied and with a wide therapeutic application. Examples such as (−)-boldine (12), (−)-liridinine (15), (+)-lirinidine (16) and glaucine (24) have been studied for its interesting antioxidant activity and, in case of 24, synthetic modifications have managed to generate derivatives that exhibit more efficient antioxidant activity in comparison with carboxy group-containing agent alone and aporphine derivative alone. Thus, clinical treatment against oxidative stress-related diseases, as Parkinson´s disease, anticancer, antinociceptive, therapeutic applications among other mentioned in this review, they give the possibility of using these aporphine alkaloids of low cytotoxicity as an excellent alternative tool in the development of new therapeutic patterns using the duplicity; biologically active ingredient-antioxidant.