Adapalene (Let’s talk about retinoids and acne more!)
30th June 2006
In the comments, yesterday, we started talking about other retinoids a bit. We were talking about naturally occuring ones and close pharmaceutical analogues. I was racking my brain today trying to come up with one that didn’t follow the terpenoid/long chain of alternating double bonds pattern. I know of one that a friend targets for his research, but I can never remember the structure. Then I remembered another: adapalene!
Not very like retinoic acid (a vitamin A-related compound):
It is a topical acne drug. Many of the acne drugs, such as Accutane (isotretinoin) and Retin-A (tretinoin, just retinoic acid, above) target Vitamin A (really retinoic acid) receptors.
My favorite part about adapalene is that it has an adamantyl group:
Adamantane is named from Latin, from Greek, from adamas (”diamond,” or “invincible” depending whom you ask). This is because the 3-d structure of that ugly thing is actually very much like diamond. This has led into a bunch of research on diamondoids and molecular diamonds, which are kind of neat. Here, it is just a bulky alkyl group.
I think it’s 4-day weekend time. See you later.