• Samuel D Banister, Axel Adams, Richard C Kevin, Christa Macdonald, Michelle Glass, Rochelle Boyd, Mark Connor, Iain S McGregor, Christopher M Havel, Stephen J Bright, Mireia Ventura Vilamala, Cristina Gil Lladanosa, Monica J Barratt, and Roy R Gerona.
• Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
• Drug Test Anal. 2019 Feb 1; 11 (2): 279-291.

AbstractSynthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists (SCRAs) are a dynamic class of new psychoactive substances (NPS), with novel chemotypes emerging each year. Following the putative detection of 5F-CUMYL-P7AICA in Australia in 2016, the scaffold-hopping SCRAs 5F-CUMYL-PICA, 5F-CUMYL-PINACA, and 5F-CUMYL-P7AICA were synthesized and characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight-MS (LC-QTOF-MS). Since little is known of the pharmacology of 7-azaindole SCRAs like 5F-CUMYL-P7AICA, the binding affinities and functional activities of all compounds at cannabinoid type 1 and type 2 receptors (CB1 and CB2 , respectively) were assessed using tritiated radioligand competition experiments and fluorescence-based plate reader membrane potential assays. Despite CB1 binding affinities differing by over two orders of magnitude (Ki  = 2.95-174 nM), all compounds were potent and efficacious CB1 agonists (EC50  = 0.43-4.7 nM), with consistent rank order for binding and functional activity (5F-CUMYL-PINACA >5F-CUMYL-PICA >5F-CUMYL-P7AICA). Additionally, 5F-CUMYL-P7AICA was found to exert potent cannabimimetic effects in mice, inducing hypothermia (6°C, 3 mg/kg) through a CB1 -dependent mechanism.© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

32 keywords...

hide…