It’s not often that drug molecules find themselves on the reagent shelf alongside materials that may have been used to assemble them. The prince and the pauper so to speak. In 2019 Paul Hergenrother from the University of Illinois published a paper in Angewandte Chemie claiming a diazomethane surrogate that was a commercially available, weighable, solid:

A couple of interesting papers published recently on aryl iodination. I sure I don’t need to reiterate how useful iodinated intermediates are in synthesis- most significantly their heightened reactivity in metal catalysed cross coupling chemistry,1 and, more recently their application as organocatalysts in hypervalent iodine chemistry.2 As is common in synthetic science, the intermediates you

In June of 1886 (26th to be precise) the French chemist Henri Mossian passed an electric current through a solution of KHF2 in anhydrous HF and became the first person to generate fluorine. Rather him than me. But he did, quite rightly, win a Nobel prize for his efforts in 1905. Since then, methods to

The scheme below shows the synthesis of a late-stage intermediate towards AZD9833, a compound identified by AstraZeneca as a selective estrogen receptor degrader (SERD) and antagonist that is currently in phase 2b clinical trials for the treatment of ER+ breast cancer. Can you identify reagents or intermediates A, B and C? Answers and a reference

Last month I posted a scheme from showing Oppolzer’s synthesis of racemic Lysergic acid and asked if you could identify reagents or intermediates G, I, and H. Below are the answers! You can read more here in the full reference: W. Oppolzer et al, Helv. Chim. Acta 1981, 64, 478–481  

Scientific Update are delighted to sponsor 10 PhD students to attend and present their work at the ‘7th Winter Process Chemistry Conference‘ which takes place in Leeds, UK | 8th-9th December 2021. Application Form

Biocatalysis is becoming ever more popular and prevalent in the synthesis of fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals and is c becoming much more widely used in industrial chemical processes generally, so this review is very timely. The review includes sections on the synthesis of “Alcohols”, “Amines”, “Carbonyls, Carboxylic acids and Derivatives”, “Glycosylation”, “Complex Molecules” and

I often stumble across interesting chemistry when I peruse my twitter feed. It’s not only rich in new chemistry highlights and ASAP links to journal articles but also chemists sharing their own experiences with both new and existing methodology- good, bad, and sometimes with pictures!- a dimension missing from just reading peer-reviewed journal articles and,

As with all things in life, necessity is the mother of invention. Synthetic chemistry, as an enabling science, will always rise to the challenge and meet the increasing demand for simpler and more efficient methods to construct fundamentally important structures and functional groups, particularly if these units are conserved privileged pharmacophores imparting biological activity to

Any new synthetic methodology, as well as advancing the state of the art, should also consider a few other key criteria, one of which is to build complexity from common feedstock materials- ideally using cheap and environmentally friendly reagents and raw materials. Unactivated (or unsubstituted) olefins, used largely by the polymer industry, represent a rich