Unnatural Products

Unnatural products have featured recently in blogs. A well deserved knighthood was noted in The Sceptical Chymist and NanoKid (a NanoPutian) starred as Molecule of the Day. The comment on federal funding got us thinking, 'why not'. After all, synthesis of unnatural products almost always involves some element of molecular design. The creativity extends beyond the (frequently demanding) synthesis.

We do not seek to trivialize the difficulties of total synthesis of something with 57 chiral centers that has been liberated from some hapless creature living at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. However we wonder whether this effort could have not been put to more productive use making something that is a little less familiar to the residents of the Marianas Trench. At the risk of being coarse, we observe that total synthesis of natural products can occasionally appear to be of a somewhat masturbatory aspect.

Interestingly, many pharmaceutical companies seek to recruit people trained in natural product synthesis as medicinal chemists. These people, whose entire research experience is synthesizing molecules that nature has chosen for them, are expected to switch to designing molecules. Meanwhile there is a trend in the pharmaceutical industry towards outsourcing synthesis to lower cost locations. This includes project compounds as well as general purpose screening library compounds. Should Pharma be more interested in NanoPutians than homogenised Marianas Trenchians? We are simple folk and it is not for us to say.