Jeff Aubé, Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor

University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, Dept of Chemistry and 

Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery

Hosted by: Brett VanVeller

https://www.aubelabunc.com/

Abstract: Our lab’s interests span the development of new organic chemistry to its applications to problems in biomedical science. With respect to the latter, we have focused on efforts in neuroscience and in infectious disease, while our work in organic chemistry has long involved new ways of making nitrogen heterocycles.

Known since antiquity, tuberculosis remains a major public health challenge throughout the world despite the availability of therapeutic interventions. This first part of the seminar will describe a heterocyclic chemistry story that arose during our efforts to develop inhibitors of the enzyme phosphopantetheinyl transferase, a newly validated anti-TB target. This will be followed an update of efforts to make pharmaceutically-relevant heterocycles using stereo- and regiochemically controlled ring expansion reactions.

Bio:  Jeffrey Aubé attended the University of Miami, where he did undergraduate research with Professor Robert Gawley (with whom he later co-authored the graduate text “Principles of Asymmetric Synthesis”, currently in its second edition). He received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1984 from Duke University, working with Professor Steven Baldwin, and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Professor Samuel Danishefsky. From 1986 until 2015, he held a faculty position in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Kansas. In 2015, he moved to the University of North Carolina, where he is an Eshelman Distinguished Professor in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry.