Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry have described a method for creating and modifying organic compounds that overcomes a major limitation of previous methods. The advance opens up a large number of novel chemical structures for synthesis and evaluation, for example, as candidate pharmaceuticals.
The new method was designed to avoid an unwanted side effect – a diversion of a catalyst molecule to the wrong location – that prevents chemists from manipulating many organic compounds in the class known as heterocycles, which are commonly used as drugs.
The newly described technique gets around this obstacle by generating a reactive catalyst at precisely the desired site on a molecule to be modified.
“We have already applied this technology to enable the modification of a wide range of chemical structures, including a complex drug candidate being developed by a major pharmaceutical company,” said Jin-Quan Yu, professor of chemistry at TSRI.
Yu and his colleagues describe the new method in a paper published by the journal Nature.