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Translational synthetic chemistry

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Providing chemical matter to modulate newly identified biological targets—as well as pre-existing but chemically intractable ones—remains a challenge in the discovery of therapeutics. Here, we discuss opportunities for synthetic chemists to make a direct impact in addressing targets that are considered 'undruggable'.

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Figure 1: Synthetic methodology enabling the efficient production of bioactive natural products.
Figure 2: Recent synthetic methodology useful for library generation and compound optimization.
Figure 3: The interplay among natural products, fragment-based approaches and natural product (NP)–inspired library generation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sarathy Kesavan and Lisa A. Marcaurelle are at H3 Biomedicine Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Sarathy Kesavan & Lisa A Marcaurelle

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  1. Sarathy Kesavan
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  2. Lisa A Marcaurelle
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Correspondence to Lisa A Marcaurelle.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Kesavan, S., Marcaurelle, L. Translational synthetic chemistry. Nat Chem Biol 9, 210–213 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.1207

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