The design of new, efficient and general methods for the preparation of enantiomerically pure pharmaceuticals is an area of great current interest. In today's climate, few, if any racemic compounds are viable candidates to become of pharmaceutical importance. The preparation of enantiomerically pure drugs is often much more costly than that of their racemic analogues. The goals of this project are to develop novel, useful and practical methods for the synthesis of optically pure compounds from readily available materials. Among others, the following will be studied: l) The asymmetric hydrogenation and hydrosilylation of imines, both cyclic and acyclic, as a route to optically pure amines. Enantiomerically pure amines are ubiquitous in both naturally occurring and man-made compounds which manifest high levels of biological activity. Moreover, hydrogenation is an environmentally friendly process; no waste is produced. 2) The asymmetric hydrogenation of olefinic substrates, particularly those which are not good substrates for more traditional methods of asymmetric hydrogenation. A wide variety of products may be produced by this technique, many of which are not conveniently or are totally inaccessible using other methodology. Included will be the preparation of optically pure main group metallacycles which are important, in their own right, in other catalytic asymmetric transformations.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 128 publications
