Amide medically important

The amide of sulfanilic acid sulfanilamide) and certain related substituted amides are of considerable medical importance as the sulfa drugs. Although they have been supplanted to a wide extent by the antibiotics (such as penicillin, terra-mycin, Chloromycetin, and aureomycin), the sulfa drugs still have their medical uses, and make up a considerable portion of the output of the pharmaceutical industry. 

Alkaloids such as caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, and digitalis, which have powerful physiological activity, are naturally occurring amines obtained from plants. In an amide, the functional group consists of a carbonyl group attached to an amine. Amides, which are derived from carboxylic acids, are important in biology in proteins. In biochemistry, the amide bond that links amino acids in a protein is called a peptide bond. Some medically important amides include acetaminophen (Tylenol) used to reduce fever phenobarbital, a sedative and anticonvulsant medication and penicillin, an antibiotic. 

Pfannemtiller et al. showed that it is possible to obtain carbohydrate-containing amphiphiles with various alkyl chains via amide bond formation. For this, mal-tooligosaccharides were oxidized to the corresponding aldonic acid lactones, which could subsequently be coupled to alkylamines [128-136]. Such sugar-based surfactants are important industrial products with applications in cosmetics, medical applications etc. [137-139]. The authors were also able to extend the attached mal-tooligosaccharides by enzymatic polymerization using potato phosphorylase, which resulted in products with very interesting solution properties [140, 141]. 

Since, in general, only monosubstituted acetic acid derivatives served as penicillin biosynthetic precursors, one of the prime structural variations made feasible for the first time by partial synthesis was that of di-and trisubstitution at the a-position of the acyl substituent. All of the semisynthetic penicillins which have become important in medical practice are in fact disubstituted at the carbon a to the amide carbonyl. Such... 

Electrospray ion sources initiated the current revolution in biological and medical uses of MS, yet the chanistry of these sources is complex, and the number of useful ions derived from a sample can be few amid a complex mixture of interfering ions. When placed between the ESI source and the mass spectrometer, EAIMS and DMS instruments can isolate ions of importance, significantly simplifying mass spectra and improving signal-to-noise ratios in quantitative measurements." - This was initiated with EAIMS instruments and is now complimented with ultraFAlMS and DMS. A direct and near-immediate use of IMS in medical research has arisen with the development of cUnical applications of IMS, as described in Section 1.3. 

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