The zaragozic acids are a class of highly oxygenated natural products that have been shown to exhibit high activities in the inhibition of squalene synthase, which is an enzyme that acts in the first committed step in the biosynthetic pathway of cholesterol. Since coronary diseases are related directly to elevated serum cholesterol levels, there has been a great effort in the development of an effective treatment of high cholesterol. The zaragozic acids have been shown to have prohibitively high toxicity, however an efficient synthesis to the zaragozic acids allows for further investigation into these types of compounds as cholesterol lowering agents. The high biological activity of the zaragozic acids paired with the synthetically challenging highly oxygenated bicyclic core make 7-deoxyzaragozic acid A a an exciting target molecule.
