STUDIES ON THE SYNTHESIS AND ANTITUMOR ACTIVITIES OF SOYBEAN ISOFLAVONES AND THEIR DERIVATIVES

AIM　To synthesize soybean isoflavones and their derivatives and to evaluate their antitumor activities preliminarily. METHODS　Polyhydric phenols and p-substituted phenylacetic acid derivatives were used as the major reactants to obtain the target compounds by multi-step synthesis. Their antitumor activities against hepatoma H22 tumor cell were tested by trypan blue exclusion method at the concentration of 50 μg.mL^-1. RESULTS　Thirteen deoxybenzoins and fourteen isoflavones were synthesized, five of them (1f～4f,1h) are new compounds. CONCLUSION　None of these compounds showed distinct antitumor activity against hepatoma H22 tumor cell, among these samples 1c and 1d gave the blue-stained ratio 10% and 5% at the concentration of 100 ng.mL^-1， respectively. Further study on the biological evaluation of the synthesized soybean isoflavones and their derivatives, is now underway.