Abstract

Nature continues to be the main source of inspiration for synthetic chemists in their quest to make novel conjugates, which can have different physical, biological and medicinal properties. Nature makes these conjugates from mixed biosynthesis and some of these chimeras are found to exhibit unusual biological properties. During the past two decades design of such entities has been receiving increasing attention. Among the hybrid natural products, hybrids of steroid frameworks have attracted great attention due to the significant biological properties and numerous therapeutic effects of steroids. The developments made over the past few years in the isolation, design and synthesis of steroidal conjugates and their pharmacological applications are discussed in this review.

Keywords: Steroidal conjugates, hybrids, polyamines, synthetic ionophores, peptides, bile acids, saponins, bis-steroids