Carbocycle
Cascade approaches to seven and eight-membered carbocycles
USIAS Fellow : Gaelle Blond
Post-doc: Nayan Ghosh
The discovery of simple processes or reactions is always one of the priorities of modern organic chemistry. It has a strong impact on the preparation of new drugs in the pharmaceutical industry, and consequently on the value of these drugs on the market. The chemical and pharmaceutical companies are looking for economical, safe and straightforward ways to produce new building blocks, for example, in the field of new anticancer drugs. The fundamental academic research is able to provide new solutions to this challenge and to broad synthetic knowledge that eventually could be applied to specific synthetic questions. The world of natural products offers a large variety of structurally complex molecules. Seven membered carbocycles are commonly present in the core of several bioactive compounds such as Cortistatins, Guanacastepenes or Englerins. Compared to smaller rings, seven-membered ring structures are difficult to obtain due to conformational and entropic reasons. As a consequence, a limited number of methods are available for the synthesis of such carbocycles. Our project proposes the preparation of new complex molecules containing such framework from original precursors by using transition-metal catalysts. The main objectives of this proposal are the design of original precursors and the investigation of their ability to undergo tandem reactions and generate chemical libraries producing exotic scaffolds and new building blocks.