The exploitation of nitrogen-functionalized reactive intermediates plays an important role in the synthesis of biologically relevant scaffolds in the field of pharmaceutical sciences. Those based on gold carbenes carry a strong potential for the design of highly efficient cascade processes toward the synthesis of compounds containing a fused indole core structure. This personal account gives a detailed explanation of our contribution to this sector, and embraces the reaction development of efficient gold-catalyzed cascade processes based on diversely functionalized azido-alkynes. Challenging cyclizations and their subsequent application in the synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant scaffolds and natural products conducted in an intra- or intermolecular fashion are key features of our research.
Keywords: gold(I)-carbenes; gold-catalysis; heterocycles; medium-sized rings; natural product synthesis.
© 2021 The Chemical Society of Japan & Wiley-VCH GmbH.