Pentose Sugars
Alternative routes to the (S)-3-hydroxylactone and to the enantiomeric (R)-lactone (2) have been developed from pentose sugars (16). Several patents covering these applications have been filed.

Starting from pentose sugars we have devised routes to numerous sugar analogs especially for use in manipulating nucleic acid and general carbohydrate processing. These compounds include carba sugars and aza (dideoxyimino) sugars. Applications include drug development in a variety of areas including:

  • Cancer (nucleoside analogs)
  • Anti-bacterial (carbohydrate processing)
  • Anti-viral (nucleoside analogs)
  • Diabetes (glycosidase inhibitors)
  • Auto-immune (nucleoside analogs, glycosidase inhibitors)

Synthon Chiragenics has executed an extensive patent protection strategy covering these applications. Many of these compounds contain several contiguous chiral centers and their synthesis represents the greatest challenges in enantioselective synthesis. The high density of chiral centers found in carbohydrates is a decided advantage.