We've reached an important milestone on our CombiUgi project involving the synthesis of falcipain-2 inhibitors. In my last update I described how our focus was more on doing many reactions in parallel and only looking for Ugi products that precipitate in pure form within a few days. It took little longer than I hoped. In order to do more reactions, we reduced our efforts towards monitoring. One of the assumptions that we made was to trust a bottle's label to accurately describe its contents. That turned out to be incorrect for one of our key aldehydes, as we eventually found out by systematically taking NMRs of the starting materials. Soon after ordering a new bottle of phenanthrene-9-carboxaldehyde we were treated to the growth of beautiful crystals (see EXP150 by Khalid and Emily):

This compound was ranked 155th out of 71,000 Ugi products for docking with falcipain-2 at potential receptor site V1 (see full description by Rajarshi Guha here).

This compound, along with another (EXP148) that crystallized similarly, have been shipped to the Rosenthal group at UCSF for testing against the malarial parasite and hopefully get some falcipain-2 inhibition assay results. That way we'll be able to investigate the validity of our docking model.

I'll be posting updates on this blog but the status of any shipped compounds will be maintained on the isolated compounds table.

If anyone would like to run their own assays please contact us. We would be happy to ship any of these compounds, as long as our collaborators are willing to work under Open Notebook conditions.

The beauty of screening for products that are purified by crystallization is that, if any of these prove to be useful for any application, it should be very simple and cheap to produce several kilograms. This can come in handy for end users with very limited resources.