Yong Li Zhong
Merck & Co., Inc., USA
Title: Practical asymmetric synthesis of a HCV nucleoside cyclic prodrug
Biography
Biography: Yong Li Zhong
Abstract
Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a liver disease that has infected an estimated 130 to 150 million people worldwide as of 2016 and killed an estimated 500,000 people around the world annually. In spite of several medicine therapies for the treatment of HCV being available, treatment failure and resistance still remain a clinical challenge. For these reasons, the search for effective antiviral agents to combat HCV is an ongoing endeavor within the global medical/pharmaceutical community. As part of an ongoing drug discovery program in our laboratories, the tile compound has been identified as one such selective and potent inhibitor of HCV NS5B nucleoside polymerase. This nucleoside cyclic prodrug is a complex, densely functionalized small molecule, which represents numerous challenges for chemical synthesis. Herein, we report a new asymmetric, practical synthetic route, which features several remarkably diastereoselective and high yielding transformations for the synthesis of the target starting from readily available starting materials.