[Recent advances in retinoids studies].

Abstract

Retinoids are defined as the compounds which elicit the specific biological responses through binding or activating the specific receptor(s). Retinoids modulate the cellular differentiation and proliferation in many types of cells. A series of retinoidal benzoic acids, named retinobenzoic acids, have potent activities on human promyelocytic leukemia cells, HL-60, and other assay systems. Among them, Am80, AM580 and Ch55 are more active than retinoic acid in most cases. As these compounds possess quite different structures or physicochemical properties from retinoic acid or conventional retinoids, they are expected to be applied clinically for the treatments of the diseases in oncology and dermatology. Recently, progresses on the mechanistic studies on retinoidal actions have been reported. One of them is isolation and cloning of human retinoic acid-receptors and the mechanism of retinoidal action was concluded that the retinoid-receptor complex interact directly with DNA to regulate the expression of the gene, like steroid hormone. The other is the establishment of the presence of the retinoid-specific-binding protein (RSBP) by the use of our retinobenzoic acids as the probe.