Brian Stoltz
California Institute of Technology, CA·Chemistry
Many medicines come from natural products, compounds made by living organisms. These compounds often have intricate ring systems and precise three-dimensional shapes.
- Fields
Chemistry
- Topics
total synthesis
natural products
organic synthesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Develop new stereoselective reactions that produce densely substituted, enantioenriched building blocks for synthesizing complex molecules.
- Develop transition metal-catalyzed asymmetric alkylation, acylation and hydrogenation reactions that build carbon frameworks with a chosen handedness.
- Adapt these catalytic methods to make building blocks with all-carbon quaternary stereocenters and arrays of adjacent stereocenters, common but hard-to-build features of polycyclic natural products.
- Apply the new methods to complete syntheses of highly complex, bioactive polycyclic natural products, which serve as testing grounds for the new chemistry.
More about the research
Building them in the lab is hard because no efficient methods exist for some of their key structural parts. This research develops new chemical reactions so that chemists can make such molecules. It then uses complex, biologically active natural products as test cases for these new methods.
Why it matters
Drug discovery often stalls because promising natural products are too complex to make in the lab. New ways to build crowded, single-mirror-image carbon frameworks could give academic, government and pharmaceutical chemists practical routes to medically relevant molecules. These routes could also be used to make related compounds for testing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Thomas Snaddon
Indiana University, IN·Chemistry
Develop enantioselective Lewis base-catalyzed reactions, using catalysts that donate an electron pair, to build fluorinated C(sp3) stereogenic centers while controlling which mirror-image form is made.
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.
Filippo Romiti
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Chemistry·Early-career
Develop a catalytic chemoselective amide reduction combined with a Friedel–Crafts coupling, which joins two alkaloid units directly, and show its use in short syntheses of the bisindole alkaloids kopsoffine and pleiomutine.
The school
California Institute of Technology: 18 labs on PI Pages, $445M a year on research, 200 research doctorates a year.
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