Adventurous Chemistry at the University of Reading: Enabling Synthesis for Chemical Biology

The design and preparation of new medicines to treat cancer is a primary goal of clinicians. The most important method for the preparation of new drugs is synthetic organic chemistry. The research proposed here will use known organic reactions and attempt to expand the utility of these reactions to enable the preparation of new drugs related to neocarzinostatin (NCS). NCS is a naturally-occurring anti-tumour drug which is used to treat liver cancer, and it consists of two parts, a large protein containing a much smaller molecule (NCS chrom) inside. The small molecule possesses all of the anti-cancer activity, but it is a very unstable molecule: thus nature has evolved to provide it only when wrapped inside a protective protein cover. If chemists could prepare compounds which had similar activity to NCS chrom, but were more stable, it might be possible to provide very effective new anti-cancer drugs. This work will try to prepare stabler new analogues of NCS-chrom.