Research Overview

It was almost 1860, thanks to the great scientists Archibald Couper, Friedrich Kekulé, and Alexander Butlerow, who recognized the tetrahedral nature of carbon atoms and established the structural formulas. The science of chemistry started to advance rapidly afterward when the true nature of the organic compounds began to unfold.

From its origin to now, nature has played a vital role in developing civilization and the globalization of living standards. For the synthetic chemist to explore future endeavors in science, nature is considered to be a source of inspiration with great challenges.

Recognizing the immense importance of heterocyclic molecules featured by their unique spatial structure and prolific therapeutic potential, the search for these compounds in natural sources and their chemical synthesis started several decades ago. However, controlling the chemo-, regio-, diastereo- and enantioselectivity for the installation of C-C, and C-X (X = O, N, S) bonds, providing rapid access to multifunctional natural products/analogs that completely excludes the pre-functionalization of latent chemical bonds, avoid highly sensitive, and expensive metal catalysts is very challenging. Again, the extraordinary implementation of selected organic transformation for drug optimization in the pharmaceutical industry often leads to a limited, crowded, and narrow medicinal chemistry space.

Indeed, high throughput screening for hits through optimization of millions of compounds for “drug-like” properties is a slow, tedious, expensive, and multistep process that results in low yield and not validated for multiple substrate combinations.

In this regard, and to address existing questions, our research is completely focused on many fascinating areas, including but not limited to the following