Antiradical and Antioxidant Activities of some new biphenyls and their monomer

Malignant melanoma is one of the most aggressive skin and chemotherapeutic agents currently in use are still unsatisfactory. Prevention and early diagnosis are the only effective tools against this tumor whose incidence and mortality rates are highly increased during the last decades in fair skin populations. It is therefore of primary interest to search for new therapeutic agents able to contrast this aggressive tumor. One of the developing strategies is to test some naturally occurring bio-antioxidants and their synthetic analogues. Pisano et all demonstrated that the biphenyl structure of the molecule is important for the antiproliferative activity and induction of apoptotic cell death on melanoma cell lines. The aim of this study is to get new information about the structure - antiradical activity of selected C2-symmetric biphenyls (dimers) of known ortho - metoxyphenols (monomers): 4-allyl-2methoxy-phenol (eugenol, Eu), 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (creosol, Cr), 1-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl) ethanone (apocynin, Apo), 4-hydroxy-3-methoxy-benzaldehyde (vanillin, Va) and (E)-3-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxy-phenyl) acrylic acid (ferulic acid, FA) and to shed some light of their mechanism of action. Dimers are expected to have anti-proliferative activity toward tumor cells