Myles Smith
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Chemistry
Many powerful medicines come from nature, but the most complex natural molecules are extremely hard to make in the lab. Building one can take years of effort and dozens of steps, and the methods often work only for that single target.
- Fields
Chemistry
Pharmacology
- Topics
total synthesis
natural product synthesis
organic synthesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Synthesize quassinoids, anticancer terpenoids, using direction-switchable oxidative coupling of simple bisphenols, so that oxygen already on the aromatic rings encodes much of the target's oxidation pattern.
- Develop new photochemistry of pyridinium ions for enantioselective desymmetrization of symmetrical allylic cation intermediates, producing highly functionalized cyclopentane building blocks.
- Apply these cyclopentane building blocks to the asymmetric synthesis of pactamycin-type aminocyclopentitols, highly potent antiparasitic natural products.
- Build two subclasses of Lycopodium alkaloids, some active in the central nervous system, through two sequential light-driven dearomatizations of a simple quinoline.
More about the research
This work uses such molecules as testbeds for inventing general ways to build complexity quickly from simple, cheap starting materials.
Why it matters
Faster, scalable routes to complex natural products could give drug developers access to anticancer quassinoids, antiparasitic pactamycin-type compounds and nervous-system-active Lycopodium alkaloids, along with new analogues. These may serve as new chemical starting points for treating disease and as tool compounds for probing biological mechanisms.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Sarlah
Rice University, TX·Chemistry
Develop a stereoselective olefination, a double-bond-forming reaction that controls 3D shape, to efficiently build the strained [5.3.2] bicyclic ring system of the cripowellin alkaloids.
Brian Stoltz
California Institute of Technology, CA·Chemistry
Develop new stereoselective reactions that produce densely substituted, enantioenriched building blocks for synthesizing complex molecules.
Mary Watson
University of Delaware, DE·Chemistry
Develop enantioselective copper-catalyzed additions of alkynes to cyclic oxocarbenium and iminium ions, positively charged ring intermediates, to make oxygen and nitrogen heterocycles with tri- and tetrasubstituted stereocenters next to the heteroatom.
The school
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center: 40 labs on PI Pages, $869M a year on research, 86 research doctorates a year.
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