Abstract:

Despite recent advances in medicine such as gene and targeted therapies, chemotherapy is still the first line of defense in the treatment of disease. Therefore, the search for novel bioactive compounds, either synthetic or natural, continues to be a critical area of research. Among the apporaches used for this purpose, the development of simple routes to expand the molecular diversity of known classes of compounds is common. While this usually involves derivatizations of a particular lead, methods that result in novel molecular scaffolds are particularly attractive. Examples of the latter are described in this presentation.