Jakub Švenda

Natural products often embody desirable properties of bioactive molecules and have a long history in basic research and human medicine. Few drugs, however, are themselves natural products and the semisynthetic derivatives predominate. Fully synthetic approaches have the exciting potential to deliver novel analogs inaccessible by semisynthesis (or other means) but are confronted with the intrinsic complexity of natural products. In this lecture, I will describe the chemistry effort ongoing in our laboratory that attempts to respond to these challenges and explore the newly created opportunities.