Asymmetric synthesis of pharmaceutically important compounds

Asymmetric synthesis of pharmaceutically important chiral drugs employing hydrolytic kinetic resolution (HKR) strategy is a main focus of our research group. Synthesis of drugs in their enantiomerically pure form becomes very important for the pharmaceutical industry, due to increased demand for more effective, safer single isomers. In this context, the success of the HKR technique developed by Jacobsen et. al using a chiral(salen)Co complex has provided a powerful tool for the generation enantio-enriched terminal epoxides and vicinal diols in excellent yields. Over the past few years, investigations in our laboratory have demonstrated the successful utility of this elegant methodology for the synthesis of many pharmaceutically important chiral drugs with high enantiopurity.

We are also interested in developing a strategies to exploit advantageously the feautures of natural products in the design of novel small molecules for various biological applications. Towards this goal, recently we synthesized various novel natural-product like small molecules based on privileged chromone motif with interesting biological properties.