Chemistry technique is 'warp drive' for creating better synthetic molecules for medicine
In the process, they found a potential drug lead for inflammatory disease, which is now being investigated further. The research appears in Nature Chemistry. "We were able to start with flat molecules and use a single chemical operation to create much more complex shapes, such as those you would expect from metabolites of medicinal plants or marine organisms," says Ryan Shenvi, PhD, Scripps Research chemistry professor and senior author of the study. "In essence, we found a way to bridge the gap between the synthetic space and natural products, opening up a whole new realm to explore for potential drugs." Nature's advantage In the field of drug discovery, compounds made by nature are thought to have some advantages over synthetic molecules, which are created from simple chemical feedstocks. Much of it has to do with their shape: so-called "natural products" tend to have complex, spherical 3-D structures that bind more precisely with molec...