Nitrogen Heterocycles Ahoy

Here's the sort of review that every working medicinal chemist will want to take a look at: Jeffrey Bode and graduate student Cam-Van T. Vo are looking at recent methods to prepare saturated nitrogen heterocycles. If you do drug discovery, odds are that you've worked with more piperidines, pyrrolidines, piperazines, morpholines, etc. than sticks can be shaken at. New ways to make substituted variations on these are always welcome, and it's good to see the latest work brought together into one place. There's still an awful lot to do in this area, though. As the review mentions, a great many methods rely on nitrogen protecting groups. From personal experience, I can tell you that my heart sinks a bit when I see some nice ring-forming reaction in the literature and only then notice that the piperidine (or what have you) has a little "Ts" or "Ns" stuck to it. I know that these things can be taken off, but it's still a pain to do, and especially if you want to make a series of compounds. Protecting-group-free routes in saturated heterocyclic chemistry are welcome indeed.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs