Highly Stereoselective Synthesis of a Compound Collection Based on the Bicyclic Scaffolds of Natural Products.

Despite the great contribution of natural products in the history of successful drug discovery, there are significant limitations that persuade the pharmaceutical industry to evade natural products in drug discovery research. The extreme scarcity as well as structural complexity of natural products renders their practical synthetic access and further modifications extremely challenging. Although other alternative technologies, particularly combinatorial chemistry, were embraced by the pharmaceutical industry to get quick access to a large number of small molecules with simple frameworks that often lack three-dimensional complexity, hardly any success was achieved in the discovery of lead molecules.

Design and synthesis of 4,5,6,7-tetrahydro-1H-1,2-diazepin-7-one derivatives as a new series of Phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4) inhibitors.

Phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4) inhibitors have attractive therapeutic potential in respiratory, inflammatory, metabolic and CNS disorders. The present work details the design, chemical exploration and biological profile of a novel PDE4 inhibitor chemotype. A diazepinone ring was identified as an under-represented heterocyclic system fulfilling a set of PDE4 structure-based design hypotheses.