Synthesis of bis-Phosphate Iminoaltritol Enantiomers and Structural Characterization with Adenine Phosphoribosyltransferase

Expedient synthesis of imino-C-nucleoside fleximers featuring a one-pot procedure to prepare aryl triazoles

Nucleoside analogues such as the antiviral agents galidesivir and ribavirin are of synthetic interest. This work reports a "one-pot" preparation of similar fleximers using a bifunctional copper catalyst that generates the aryl azide in situ, which is captured by a terminal alkyne to effect triazole formation.

Regiospecific formation of sugar-derived ketonitrone towards unconventional C-branched pyrrolizidines and indolizidines

The synthesis of unprecedented branched pyrrolizidines and indolizidines was accomplished via nitrone chemistry.

The transition to magic bullets - transition state analogue drug design

In the absence of industry partnerships, most academic groups lack the infrastructure to rationally design and build drugs via methods used in industry. Instead, academia needs to work smarter using mechanism-based design. Working smarter can mean the development of new drug discovery paradigms and then demonstrating their utility and reproducibility to industry. The collaboration between Vern Schramm's group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA and Peter Tyler at the Ferrier Research Institute at The Victoria University of Wellington, NZ has refined a drug discovery process called transition state analogue design. This process has been applied to several biomedically relevant nucleoside processing enzymes. In 2017, Mundesine®, conceived using transition state analogue design, received market approval for the treatment of peripheral T-cell lymphoma in Japan. This short review looks at a brief history of transition state analogue design, the fundamentals behind the development of this process, and the success of enzyme inhibitors produced using this drug design methodology.