Natural productshave long been regarded as “Nature’s medicine chest” providing a rich source of lead compounds to synthesize for pharmaceutical development.  Natural product synthesis has also been described as an ‘enabling science’ because it provides unlimited opportunity for discovery at the interface with biology and medicine.  Our research in synthetic organic chemistry and medicinal chemistry focuses on making and modifying naturally occurring bioactive compounds that have been isolated from plants, animal tissue, microbes or marine and soil organisms, which are rare or hard to isolate in abundance.  These compounds provide rich and diverse chemical structures that challenge the synthetic chemist to develop new synthetic methodology for construction of the novel and diverse heterocyclic motifs that they contain.  The chemical synthesis of these complex bioactive molecules is a challenging endeavour.  It demands academic and manipulative rigour, creativity, dedication, persistence and hard work.  The tactics and synthetic maneuvering involved in executing a given synthesis has also been compared to the logic and rationale behind a game of chess.

Over the last decade our research group in Australasia has focused on the development of flexible synthetic approaches to several natural products which have important biological activity.  The synthesis of the molecules has also allowed the preparation of synthetic analogues of the natural compound which may lead to improvements in biological activity and an understanding of the way the naturally occurring compounds act.