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A novel complexity-to-diversity strategy for the diversity-oriented synthesis of structurally diverse and complex macrocycles from quinine.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Ciardiello, JJ 
Stewart, HL 
Sore, HF 
Galloway, WRJD 
Spring, DR 

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a global decline in the productivity and advancement of the pharmaceutical industry. A major contributing factor to this is the downturn in drug discovery successes. This can be attributed to the lack of structural (particularly scaffold) diversity and structural complexity exhibited by current small molecule screening collections. Macrocycles have been shown to exhibit a diverse range of biological properties, with over 100 natural product-derived examples currently marketed as FDA-approved drugs. Despite this, synthetic macrocycles are widely considered to be a poorly explored structural class within drug discovery, which can be attributed to their synthetic intractability. Herein we describe a novel complexity-to-diversity strategy for the diversity-oriented synthesis of novel, structurally complex and diverse macrocyclic scaffolds from natural product starting materials. This approach exploits the inherent structural (including functional) and stereochemical complexity of natural products in order to rapidly generate diversity and complexity. Readily-accessible natural product-derived intermediates serve as structural templates which can be divergently functionalized with different building blocks to generate a diverse range of acyclic precursors. Subsequent macrocyclisation then furnishes compounds that are each based around a distinct molecular scaffold. Thus, high levels of library scaffold diversity can be rapidly achieved. In this proof-of-concept study, the natural product quinine was used as the foundation for library synthesis, and six novel structurally diverse, highly complex and functionalized macrocycles were generated.

Description

Keywords

Chemical space, Complexity-to-diversity, Diversity-oriented synthesis, Library synthesis, Macrocycles, Natural products, Scaffold, Macrocyclic Compounds, Molecular Structure, Quinine

Journal Title

Bioorg Med Chem

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0968-0896
1464-3391

Volume Title

25

Publisher

Elsevier BV
Sponsorship
Royal Society (WM150022)
EPSRC (1502980)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/J016012/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P020291/1)
European Research Council (279337)
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013)/ERC grant agreement no [279337/DOS]. In addition, the group research was supported by grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and AstraZeneca.