Total Synthesis Blog

Do you know snowdrops? It’s well-known that bulbs of these flowers (latin name is Galanthus nivalis) contain many alkaloids and galantamine (or galanthamine) is one of them:

This is an important natural product because of its biological properties and phamacological applications – it’s used in treatment of mild Alzheimer’s disease. So there are many approaches to total synthesis of galantamine and here I’ll try to show most recent of them (I think so).

Authors of the paper on which I base developed new interesting reaction: DMCRC – what means Double Michael-Claisen Reaction Cascade. The reaction allows to synthesise quickly highly substituted cyclohexenones which can be used in total syntheses of many ’sterically congested’ natural products and galantamine is only one of several examples mentioned in paper (the others are aspidospermidone, lycoramine and  mesembrine).

Let’s look at retrosynthetic analysis:

As you can see, that organic synthesis of galantamine starts with arylated acetone. Now, let’s see how it was acomplished:

Mentioned before acetone 2 was undergone DMCRC (yeah, exercise that name one more time – Double Michael-Claisen Reaction Cascade) reaction with tert-butyl ester of acrylic acid. The mechanism of this conversion isn’t so obvious and you can find full explanation (with some calculations of transition states) in paper. The most important thing is that termodynamic enolate of 2 reacts faster with acrylic ester than kinetic enolate of 2. This is the secret of this reaction

Let’s get back to synthetic route. Formed 1,3-dienone 3 is converted in next step to enol ether 4 which is next reduced to enone 5. Enone 5 is then protected (self-protected) by primary alcohol moiety in Michael-type reaction and this allows to selective removal benzyl group to give 7 without any saturation on carbon-carbon double bond.

Then released phenolic -OH group participates in five-membered fused ring and 8 is formed. Next, two oxidations were performed to oxidise primary -OH group to carboxylic acid. Transformation 9 to 10 is a Curtius rearrangement and DPPA (DiPhenyl PhosporoAzidate) is a donor of azides here. Now, Pictet-Spengler cyclization occurs to give 11, and mechanism of this reaction is drawn below:

Synthesis of galantamine is completed in such way:

There is nice method of conversion cyclohexanone 11 to cyclohexenone 13 in palladium-catalyzed process. Mechanism is:

β-elimination of organopalladium compound can only occur at one side of carbon-oxygen double bond.

In last step 13 is reduced by L-Selectride (stereoselective reduction of carbonyl group) and LiAlH₄ (reduction of ester moiety) and galantamine 1 is formed.

For more pieces of information of course see:

T. Ishikawa, S. Saito et al., J. Org. Chem., 2008, 7498.