"We mainly explore the possibility of expanding the landscape of small molecules synthesis by employing a wide-range of transition metal complexes; developing new catalytic methods that are aided by the understanding of the reactivity/reaction paths, the orchestration of sequential reactions in one-pot;  unravelling the capability of these new methods in forging a variety of complex natural products; and designing modular strategies that employ endless recombination of simple building blocks,  thus providing simple solutions for accessing pharmaceutically relevant small molecules in large numbers and/or on large scales"

Total Synthesis:

The molecular complexity associated with the natural products manifest nature’s ingenuity and the diverse biological activities that these natural products display manifest its foresight for the well-being of all living organisms. Due to their co-existence and their optimization along with the evolution of life, natural products have been regarded as pre-validated lead structures for chemical biology and medicinal chemistry research. Secondly, because they have been accommodated in some living organisms, either during their own bio-synthesis or through their involvement in the modulation of respective biological processes, natural products and, to a major extent, naturally products like small molecules, can move fast across the critical pharmacokinetic and bioavailability barriers when compared with a randomly synthesized small molecule. In the wake of the failure of the combinatorial libraries in delivering a magic bullet, the attention has focused back on the complexity and diversity of nature’s small-molecules in the new drug discovery programs. Concepts founded upon the designing around, and of the synthesis of natural products and natural product like small molecules have provided a direct entry of “total synthesis programs” into medicinal chemistry research.The development of synthetic methods that are efficient and the design of strategies that are modular with a flexibility window is a prerequisite for the synthesis of natural products derived and inspired compound collections. The   synthesis of a wide array of such complex molecules requires flexibility in terms of the reagents/substrates to be employed and, more importantly, the reactions that address the skeletal diversity from similar as well as simple intermediates. The development of such tools demands integration of powerful mechanistic thinking and innovative substrate design which form the basic criterion of our research programs. In the following sections, we will describe some of our methodology development/mechanistic investigations aimed at the total synthesis of natural products and/or pharmaceutically important small molecules. During the last five years, a variety of natural products and their analogues have been synthesized in our lab.

Recent Total Syntheses