David Sarlah
Rice University, TX·Chemistry
Many medicines and crop-protection chemicals come from molecules made by living things, known as natural products. These molecules are often too complex to make or modify easily in the laboratory, so promising compounds can go unstudied.
- Fields
Chemistry
Pharmacology
- Topics
total synthesis
natural products
organic synthesis
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- 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.
- Establish a labdane-to-clerodane skeletal rearrangement that moves several chemical groups across a two-ring decalin core, creating new synthetic routes between two classes of terpenoid natural products.
- Create a regiodivergent, transition metal-catalyzed cycloaddition that can be steered to form rings in different orientations, giving access to a large class of complex cyclophane-containing peptides.
- Synthesize isomalabaricane triterpenoids, nimbolide and perhydrobenz[e]indene-based terpenoids, building on stereodivergent access to all four stereoisomers of a rare 6/6/5 tricyclic terpenoid core.
- Test synthetic terpenoids and their analogues for anticancer and anti-infective activity with chemical biology collaborators, and identify their molecular targets, mechanisms of action and metabolites.
More about the research
Both projects tackle this supply problem. They design new chemical reactions and step-by-step routes (syntheses) that build complex natural products quickly and with control over their 3D shape. One project focuses on new building strategies for several molecule families. The other focuses on terpenoids, a large family of ring-rich natural products, and on testing them for biological activity.
Why it matters
Natural products have inspired more than 80% of all drugs and over 65% of anticancer drugs, but many cannot be studied because they are scarce and hard to make. Faster, more practical syntheses could supply these compounds and their analogues for testing as new cancer and infection treatments. They could also help manufacture high-value compounds used in medicinal chemistry and agriculture.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Brian Stoltz
California Institute of Technology, CA·Chemistry
Develop new stereoselective reactions that produce densely substituted, enantioenriched building blocks for synthesizing complex molecules.
Myles Smith
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Chemistry
Synthesize quassinoids, anticancer terpenoids, using direction-switchable oxidative coupling of simple bisphenols, so that oxygen already on the aromatic rings encodes much of the target's oxidation pattern.
The school
Rice University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 267 research doctorates a year.
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