Monday, July 28, 2014

Cubanes! Get Your Cubanes, Here!

A cube of med-chem cubanes**
It's not often you see drug candidates advanced with cubane substructures.* A collaborative group from the UK branch of AstraZeneca and Oxford University aims to change that: a report in Organic Letters indicates they've produced gram-scale quantities of cubane derivatives with common med-chem handles already "baked in."

Starting from a 1,4-cubane diester, Burton, Davies, and Wlochal take turns elaborating each side into thiazoles, beta-diketones, nitriles, amine salts, and ynones. Though more cautious readers might expect the cubed synthons to go up in smoke, they actually seem to survive fairly rigorous conditions - boiling water, phosphoryl and oxalyl chloride, TMS triflate, LDA.

I'd be most interested to hear from any readers who integrate these new building blocks (sorry, couldn't resist!) into their research. It's hip to be...cubic.

* On Twitter, CJ (rightly) points out that the authors could have done some DSC (stability) and solubility assays, just to put minds at ease that these synthons really could be integrated into a drug campaign.

**Not a real substance (but wouldn't that be something???)

4 comments:

  1. Bah...I'm not impressed until there's a 4D tesseract-like cubane . . . hypercubane?

    ReplyDelete
  2. i very briefly thought the structure depicted in the graphic was one molecule. now that would be really impressive

    ReplyDelete
  3. Are You Searching For Dankwoods Near Me ? Buy Best Quality Dankwoods Pre Rolls At Cheap Price. All Dankwoods Flavors are available.

    Get Discount On Bulk Order. Fast And Discreet Delivery. Moneyback Guarantee.

    ReplyDelete