De-Hai Liu, Philipp M Pflüger, Andrew Outlaw, Lukas Lückemeier, Fuhao Zhang, Clinton Regan, Hamid Rashidi Nodeh, Tim Cernak, Jiajia Ma, Frank Glorius
The available methods of chemical synthesis have arguably contributed to the prevalence of aromatic rings, such as benzene, toluene, xylene, or pyridine, in modern pharmaceuticals. Many such sp2 -carbon-rich fragments are now easy to synthesize using high-quality cross-coupling reactions that click together an ever-expanding menu of commercially available building blocks, but the products are flat and lipophilic, decreasing their odds of becoming marketed drugs. Converting flat aromatic molecules into saturated analogues with a higher fraction of sp3 carbons could improve their medicinal properties and facilitate the invention of safe, efficacious, metabolically stable, and soluble medicines...
April 15, 2024: Journal of the American Chemical Society