Discovery may aid cocaine treatment

So far, the chemistry, which is based on the use of a chiral catalyst, is being applied by the UB team to develop a variety of new chemical structures.

Among them is a compound to treat cocaine addiction that is undergoing toxicological studies at the National Institute of Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.

Another compound developed by the UB team has demonstrated success in animal studies as an antidepressant.

The method is based on a convergent synthesis strategy, an extremely efficient method where two large structural components are brought together to create a compound.

This approach makes it possible to control the synthesis of a wide range of biologically important compounds that, until now, could not be synthesized efficiently in the laboratory.

A patent on the method has been filed.

The chemistry and some of the compounds that have been synthesized using it were described at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Orlando, Fla.

We have developed a powerful, flexible method of synthesizing very important building blocks in organic synthesis," said Huw M.L. Davies, professor of chemistry at UB and lead investigator.

One of the most biologically active groups of compounds to which the new synthesis method is being applied are the tropanes, which show very high selectivity in their interaction with various regions of the brain.

Past efforts to develop a chemical treatment for addiction to cocaine, which is a tropane, have been hampered by the lack of a reliable synthetic method.

According to Davies, a major challenge in contemporary chemistry is the controlled synthesis of chiral molecules. He explained that such syntheses are important because chiral molecules and their mirror images are different structures and each can display different properties, especially when interacting with living organisms.

Pharmaceutical companies therefore prefer to develop new chiral drugs as a single isomer so they can avoid concerns about the possible negative interactions of the inactive mirror-image structure.

However, many existing methods of synthesizing tropanes and other biologically important chemicals produce an equal mixture of the two isomers.

By using a small amount of a chiral metal catalyst, the UB scientists have found a way to predetermine that only one structure-and not its mirror-image-will be produced.

In addition to compounds developed by the UB team, Nobel Laureate E.J. Corey of Harvard University has used the UB method to synthesize the active isomer of the antidepressant sertraline.