Dr. Sebastian Beil receives an NWO Veni Grant

Sebastian Beil’s Veni project “Lighting the way of drug discovery: photochemical synthesis of non-natural amino acids” has been granted by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

In this project, mild photochemical methodologies will be developed to produce α-, β-, and γ-functionalized non-natural amino acids in single steps from inexpensive naturally occuring starting materials. To do so, theory and mechanistic investigations, as inherent design principles, will be combined with high-throughput screening of reaction conditions to provide a diverse library of non-natural amino acids as ready-to-use building blocks for incorporation into drug molecules which target bacterial infections, blood platelet aggregation, or the coronavirus. The obtained non-natural amino acids will allow new concepts toward the synthesis of alkaloid natural products that are not accessible with current methodologies.