Goverdhan Mehta
School of Chemistry, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad 500046, India

Abstract:

Nature, the master craftsman of molecules, has created almost an inexhaustible array of molecular entities, replete with myriad combination of rings, functionalities and stereochemical diversity. Indeed, plants and other living organisms expend considerable amount of their genomic resources to craft natural products which are fashioned in a complex biological milieu. Thus, natural products are endowed with unmatched ‘evolutionary wisdom’ and in some ways are already validated for binding to protein domains. There is little surprise therefore that many natural products display potent, wide ranging and at times unique biological activity profile. A substantial portion of currently used drugs had their origin in natural product leads but a lot more remains to be unraveled and tapped in this arena. It stands to reason that the vast repertoire created by Nature in the form of diverse natural product platforms be fully harnessed for drug discovery and human wellbeing through synergy with organic synthesis. This can be achieved either through re-engineering (therapeutic editing!) the abundantly available natural products or by creating new hybrid molecular entities or through total synthesis and its diverted variant.

The endeavor would be to highlight the intrinsic synergy that is inherent between natural products, total synthesis and drug discovery through recent research endeavors from my research group. In particular, the focus will be on the development of ‘global’ strategies for total synthesis that provide access to a whole family of natural products rather than a single entity for further biological evaluation and development. In this lecture, we will briefly cover our synthetic approaches to several natural product types which are simple, conceptually novel and diversity oriented.

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