Bring Me More Cute Ring Systems

Here's a paper from the Carreira group at the ETH, in collaboration with Roche, that falls into a category I've always enjoyed. I put these under the heading of "Synthetic routes into cute functionalized ring systems", and you can see my drug-discovery bias showing clearly.

Med-chem people like these kinds of molecules. (I have a few of them drawn here, but all the obvious variations are in the paper, too). They aren't in all the catalogs (yet), they're in no one's screening collection, and they have a particular kind of shape that might not be covered by anything else we already have in our files. There's no reason why something like this might not be the core of a bunch of useful compounds - small saturated nitrogen heterocycles fused to other rings sure do show up all over the place.

And the purpose of this sort of paper matches a drug discovery person's worldview exactly: here's a reasonable way into a large number of good-looking compounds that no one's ever screened, so go to it. (Here's an earlier paper from Carreira in the same area). The chemistry involved in making this things is good, solid stuff: it's not cutting-edge, but it doesn't have to be. It's done on a reasonable scale, and it certainly looks like it would work just fine. I can understand why readers from other branches of organic chemistry would skip over a paper like this. No theoretical concerns are addressed in the syntheses, no natural products are produced, no new catalysts are developed, and no ne...

Source: In the Pipeline - September 10, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs