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Cytarabine


Mechanism of action:

Cytarabine is a pyrimidine nucleoside analog. Its structure resembles cytidine, but its sugar moiety is arabinose rather than ribose. Cytarabine itself is a prodrug and must be phosphorylated intracellularly into cytarabine triphosphate to become pharmacologically active. Cytarabine triphosphate competitively binds to DNA polymerase against dCTP and can also be incorporated into DNA, causing chain elongation to be blocked. This results in termination of DNA synthesis and ultimately induces apoptosis.

Reference(s):

1. Angeli JP et al. (2006). Anti-clastogenic effect of beta-glucan extracted from barley towards chemically induced DNA damage in rodent cells. Hum Exp Toxicol. 


2. Prakasha Gowda AS et al. (2010). Incorporation of gemcitabine and cytarabine into DNA by DNA polymerase beta and ligase III/XRCC1. Biochemistry. 


3. Zhou Y et al. (2024). TTD: Therapeutic Target Database describing target druggability information. Nucleic Acids Res.

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