A team of iNANO chemists headed by Professor Troels Skrydstrup in collaboration with Assistant Professor Anders Lindhardt from the Department of Engineering have devised a new chemical transformation, which was applied to the synthesis of the statin family of drugs. Statins are important cholesterol lowering drugs for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia by inhibition of its biosynthesis.

The team was able to able to assemble the whole statin skeleton via a palladium-catalysed three-component coupling applying the one-carbon building block, carbon monoxide. The approach was also found useful for isotope-labelling, a technique which is important for subsequent pharmacokinetic and toxicity studies in drug-development programs.

For further information to this novel chemistry, see
I. S. Makarov, T. Kuwahara, X. Jusseau, I. Ryu, A. T. Lindhardt, and T. Skrydstrup, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 14043–14046.

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