Projects
Solid hybrid catalysts for aromatic alkenylation and arylation via C-H activation KU Leuven
Metal-catalyzed activation of C-H bonds has attracted much attention over the past decade for its potential to efficiently introduce complexity in organic molecules, without the need for prefunctionalization. However, even in the state-of-the-art systems, high noble metal loadings (5−10 mol %) are generally needed to achieve high yields, which impedes industrial implementation of this new synthetic strategy given the high costs associated ...
Palladium-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling via C-H Activation for the Step-Efficient Production of Pharmaceuticals KU Leuven
Advances in synthetic chemistry have enabled the discovery and production of pharmaceutical substances with ever increasing complexity. To safeguard the affordability and sustainability of medicines as a cornerstone of human healthcare, it is of great importance to devise new synthetic reactions with maximal efficiency. The traditional method to produce the C-C bonds which constitute the core framework of organic molecules involves the ...
Rational design of Pd-catalysts for C-H activation and Ru-catalysts for C=O hydrogenation: from operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy identification of metal complexes to multi-technique machine learning-based characterization KU Leuven
X-ray absorption spectroscopy is a powerful technique to study the active compounds in catalytic cycles, since it is element specific and can thus selectively probe the catalytic species in complex mixtures. Its major drawbacks include the complexity of the data analysis when simultaneously studying multiple catalytic species and the lack of the required reference compounds for reactive intermediates. Here, we will develop a new and powerful ...
Site-Selective Derivatization and Cyclization of Peptides by On-Resin Metal-Catalyzed C-H Activation. KU Leuven
Molecular scale design of C-H activation catalysts for the cost-efficient and sustainable production of pharmaceuticals KU Leuven
A dance with palladium: exploration of propargylguanidines in tandem cyclization / C-H activation processes for the synthesis of kealiinine analogues and related medium-rings. KU Leuven
The new alkaloids kealiininesA-C, isolated in 2004 by Proksch and co-workers from the marine sponge Leucetta chagosensis, display a typical 2-aminoimidazole skeleton.They have been shown to posses a naphthimidazole moiety, which could be regarded as a conformationally constrained variant of the related naami(di)ne alkaloids, which possess interesting pharmaceutical properties. Although kealiinineA showed promising bioactivity, no profound ...
Solid Catalysts for activation of aromatic C-H bonds KU Leuven
The H-CCAT project designs, upscales and shapes hybrid catalysts for the C-H functionalization of aromatic compounds. These solid catalysts will possess better recoverability, higher turnover numbers and better selectivity than current homogeneous catalysts for these reactions. The solid catalysts are applied at demonstration scale in the step-economical production of arylated or alkenylated aromatics, yielding motifs of active pharmaceutical ...
Solid catalysts for C-H activation in aromatics: from active site design to fabrication of catalyst microspheres KU Leuven
Innovation in medical therapy relies strongly on the availability of high-quality but affordable therapeutic molecules. A structural analysis of recently approved Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), and of (projected) blockbuster drugs in particular, reveals that at least one third of them contains vinylated, arylated or aminated aromatic compounds. Affordable access to complex aromatic molecules is a hot issue in the advanced polymers ...