The principles guiding the design and synthesis of bioactive compounds based on natural product (NP) structure, such as biology-oriented synthesis (BIOS), are limited by their partial coverage of the NP-like chemical space of existing NPs and retainment of bioactivity in the corresponding compound collections. Here we propose and validate a concept to overcome these limitations by de novo combination of NP-derived fragments to structurally unprecedented ‘pseudo natural products’. Pseudo NPs inherit characteristic elements of NP structure yet enable the efficient exploration of areas of chemical space not covered by NP-derived chemotypes, and may possess novel bioactivities. We provide a proof of principle by designing, synthesizing and investigating the biological properties of chromopynone pseudo NPs that combine biosynthetically unrelated chromane- and tetrahydropyrimidinone NP fragments. We show that chromopynones define a glucose uptake inhibitor chemotype that selectively targets glucose transporters GLUT-1 and -3, inhibits cancer cell growth and promises to inspire new drug discovery programmes aimed at tumour metabolism.

指导设计和合成基于天然产物（NP）结构的生物活性化合物的原理，例如面向生物学的合成（BIOS），受到它们对现有NP的类似NP的化学空间的部分覆盖和生物活性的保留的限制。相应的化合物集合。在这里，我们提出并验证了一个概念，即通过将NP衍生片段从头合成为结构上空前的“伪天然产物”来克服这些限制。伪NP继承了NP结构的特征元素，但仍然能够有效探索NP衍生的化学型未涵盖的化学空间区域，并且可能具有新颖的生物活性。我们通过设计，合成并研究结合了生物合成无关的苯并吡喃酮和四氢嘧啶酮NP片段的色炔酮假NP的生物学特性。我们表明色炔酮定义了一种葡萄糖摄取抑制剂的化学型，选择性地靶向葡萄糖转运蛋白GLUT-1和-3，抑制癌细胞的生长，并有望激发针对肿瘤代谢的新药物发现计划。