Sarah Perlmutter

Research Description: The majority of small molecule drugs approved over the past two decades have originated from high throughput screening (HTS) libraries. However, most current synthetic libraries are generally comprised of relatively planar molecules that lack stereochemical complexity, limiting the potential number of drug targets. My research focuses on using the Complexity-to-Diversity (CtD) strategy developed by the Hergenrother lab to help improve complexity of molecules in HTS libraries. The CtD strategy utilizes chemoselective reactions to dramatically change the core ring structures of natural products to create distinct new scaffolds which maintain or increase structural complexity as measured by fraction sp3 and number of stereogenic centers.