Fucoidans as a platform for new anticoagulant drugs discovery

Anionic fucose-containing polysaccharides (fucoidans of brown seaweeds, sulfated fucans and fucosylated chondroitin sulfates of invertebrates) are attracting a rapidly growing research interest due to different types of their biological activity discovered in recent years. In particular, algal fucoidans are characterized by large structural variations depending on the species used for their isolation and by the lack of structural regularity due to random distribution of both carbohydrate and non-carbohydrate substituents along the polymer chains. These features make it difficult to find distinct correlations between structural elements and biological properties of polysaccharides. Nevertheless, there is expectation that systematic structural and biochemical studies of fucoidans will form a basis for the development of new drugs. Herewith we summarize our recent results on the influence of fucoidan structure on blood coagulation.