Efficient Total Synthesis of Polycyclic Natural Products

Yanxing Jia

State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences Peking University, Beijing 100191, China

Natural product and/or natural product structures continued to play a highly significant role in pharmaceutical (the drug discovery and development process), agrochemical (pesticides), and flavor industries. The total synthesis of natural products has served as the ultimate testing ground for new methodologies and strategies, and a principal driving force for discovering new synthetic strategy and method.

Currently, the development of short synthetic routes for the synthesis of complex natural products remains a major topic in synthetic organic chemistry, because they offer the best ways to achieve overall efficiency. Especially, the synthetic routes can be able to provide large quantities of complex natural products, and also be amenable to the preparation of diverse natural product analogues, which allowed for a deeper understanding of biological activities or enabled further investigational collaborations.

In this lecture, I will present our recent achievements in the total synthesis of some natural products, and the development of new synthetic strategy and method.