CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF MAYTANSINOL, CANNABIDIOL AND CALLYSPONGIOLIDE IN NATURAL PRODUCT CHEMISTRY

The development of new drugs has long been inspired by Nature as the main source of the biologically active compounds. This practice has motivated total synthesis and diversity-oriented synthesis in the drug discovery and drug design process because natural products offer great opportunities to find new low molecular weight structures active against a wide range of assay targets. Obtaining a synthetic source and creation of derivative analogs would allow a greater understanding of the biologocal effects because natural products has tipically been extracted in complex mixture with other compounds making isolation impossible with useful quantities. With this in mind, the enantioselective syntheses carried out to obtain maytansinol-based conjugates as microtubule modulators, cannabidiol-C4, and two fragments of callyspongiolide are described in this thesis.