Abstract 

The Building Block Economy: Synthetic Organic Chemistry in the Age of Outsourcing

The rise of high quality, low price synthetic services companies prevents both challenges and opportunities to research groups in organic methodology and synthesis. Our group has adapted by focusing on developing innovative new reactions that assemble complex structures from small, chiral building blocks. These reactions allow efficient access to structures including cyclic peptides, synthetic proteins, saturated N-heterocycles, and advanced scaffolds for drug development. Careful design of the building blocks enable unified synthetic approaches to diverse structures, making them amenable to outsourcing and scale up. Coupled with efforts to simplify and automated the assembly of these building blocks, this approach allows access to some of the most complicated and desirable targets in organic chemistry in a predictable, reliable manner.

 Bio

Jeffrey Bode was born in 1974 near Los Angeles, California and studied Chemistry (B.S., 1996) and Philosophy (B.A., 1996) at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Following graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and ETH Zürich, he was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 2003, he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and in 2007 moved to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as an Associate Professor. In 2010, he returned to ETH Zürich as Professor of Synthetic Organic Chemistry.  He has served as Chair of the Editorial Board for Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry and is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of Helvetica Chimica Acta and an Executive Editor for the Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis. Since 2013, he is also Principal Investigator and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Transformative Biomolecules (ITbM) at Nagoya University in Japan. His research group works on the development of new organic methods and their applications to complex molecule synthesis, chemical protein synthesis and bioconjugation, and chemical biology. His research and teaching have been recognised by numerous awards, most recently the 2018 Mukaiyama Award.