Reaction between harmaline and vanillin to produce dimeric scaffoldsthat exhibit anti-proliferative activity.

Herbal medicine is used as a complement to modern medicine for the treatment of human diseases suchas cancer, inflammation, and diabetes. Nutraceutical components in foods such as vanillin produceantioxidant and anticancer activities and many of these produce minimal adverse effects in humans.Therefore, strategies that combine both herbal medicine and nutraceutical components could producecompounds that exhibit reduced toxicity. Recently, we developed GZ16.007, which is a combination ofharmaline and curcumin that is currently undergoing clinical evaluation for the treatment of cancer. Incontrast to the utilization of curcumin, we report herein the synthesis of a novel scaffold that utilizes har-maline and vanillin as nutraceutical components to form a newly identified anti-cancer scaffold. It wasdetermined that the inclusion of two molecules of harmaline and a single equivalent of vanillin produceda dimeric product that was active against various human cancer cell lines. The synthesis, evaluation andpreliminary SAR studies for the dimeric scaffold is discussed herein.