Now, safer and cheaper building blocks for anti-HIV drugs

Developing various anti-HIV, anti-cancer and anti-bacterial drugs could be a lot easier as researchers have now developed an economical, reliable and metal-free chemical reaction that could yield building blocks for these drugs.

The chemical reaction, developed by a team of researchers from University of Leuven in Belgium, yields fully functional 1,2,3-triazoles.

Leveraging the compound's surprisingly stable structure, drug developers have successfully used 1,2,3-triazoles as building blocks in various anti-HIV, anti-cancer and anti-bacterial drugs.

But efforts to synthesize the compound have been hampered by one serious hurdle: they depend on harmful heavy metals to work, and this severely limits their biological applications.

In new experiments, the researchers reported that 1,2,3-triazoles can be synthesised through a metal-free, three-component reaction using readily available ingredients.

"We were able to develop a reaction that provided a good yield, high regioselectivity and easy access to diversely functionalized 1,2,3-triazoles," said professor Wim Dehaen.

"In other words, the reaction produces plenty of the compounds we are looking for, does so reliably without unwanted or unexpected outcomes, and does this in a way that makes it easy for us to isolate the compound. This makes our method highly desirable," Dehaen added.

The findings appeared in the journal Angewandte Chemie.