Hu Wenhao Research Team published their finding in an online paper on Nature Chemistry
Hu Wenhao Research Team of ECNU Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Molecular Therapeutics and New Drug Development finds an efficient method for the synthesis of new drugs. This new technique is a breakthrough in metal carbene chemistry, and can be used to synthesize indole derivatives with complex structure.
The research team published their finding in an online paper “Highly enantioselective trapping of zwitterionic intermediates by imines” on Nature Chemistry in July, 2012, and all the research work is conducted in ECNU. Nature Chemistry, a monthly scientific journal concerning chemistry, is published by Nature Publishing Group, one of the most authoritative academic publishing companies in the world.
New drugs consist of two categories: chemical medicines and biological medicines. In the past 20 years, new chemical medicines have taken a large 70 percent among new drugs under approval worldwide, and 61 percent approved new drugs in the world are developed in U.S. Comparing with U.S., China has a lot to do in this field as its pharmaceutical industry still remains on the stage of imitating foreign medicines.
For the last 10 years, the global production of novel chemical entities has been on the decline despite the increase in pharmaceutical R&D spending. One of the main reasons is that the available technology at present cannot be applied to synthesize a large number of new compounds with diversified structures to sift in an efficient way. To solve this problem, Professor Hu Wenhao and his team have spent years in exploring the highly efficient technique for pharmaceutical Synthesis.
Research shows new compounds synthesized through the technique discovered by Prof. Hu's team exists in many medicines and these new compounds have many important biological activities such as anti-tumor and anti-diabetes. According to some experts, the finding has a great potential for the research and development of new drugs.
Written by: Huang Saisai
Edited by: Liu Jinyu
