Ping Zhang & David Sarlah

3:30 p.m. – Opening Remarks

3:35 p.m.  Ping Zhang, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Cambridge, MA

Application of Flow Chemistry Under MedChem Setting

In early drug discovery stage, the key challenges are how to access the desired compounds as fast as possible and how to achieve rapid scale of up the hits. The benefits brought by flow chemistry provide us unique opportunities to tackle both problems. In this presentation, I will be sharing a few stories on how do we use flow technologies to solve problems under medchem settings.

4:30 p.m. – Introductory Remarks

4:35 p.m.  David Sarlah, Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Sarlah Group

Dearomative Functionalization Strategies and Synthesis of Anticancer Natural Products

Small complex molecules are highly desired in all areas of chemistry, but they are also often difficult to access. Selective transformations of aromatic compounds could provide a more direct route to such desirable targets; however, the many challenges associated with dearomative functionalization have left these types of reactions widely underdeveloped. Our group has been developing new strategies that bridge the gap between dearomatization functionalization and alkene chemistry. In pursuit of this goal, we have developed dearomative functionalizations using small molecules – arenophiles – that enable reactions of isolated alkenes in aromatic substrates. Thus, well-established olefin reactions, such as dihydroxylation and reduction, can now be more directly applied to arenes. Additionally, arenophiles in combination with transition metal catalysis provide unique platform and enable the rapid access to a diverse range of products that are both challenging to synthesize via existing methods and complementary to those acquired through biological or chemical dearomative processes. Finally, using this methodology we have recently completed the synthesis of several complex anticancer natural products.

Reception to Follow