Silas Cook ’99 Develops “Five-Pot” Preparation of Anti-Malarial Drug

One problem facing malaria patients is “resistance,” the ability of the malaria parasite to fend off traditional antimalarial drugs. Another problem is the limited availability/expense of newer, more potent antimalarials, like (+)-artemisinin, that can overpower resistant parasites.

An important step forward in the fight against malaria has just been taken by Prof. Silas Cook ’99 and his research team at Indiana University. They have recently published a new “five pot” sequence that begins with a simple inexpensive compound, cyclohexenone, and ends with gram-quantities of artemisinin (research article: J. Am. Chem. Soc. DOI: 10.1021/ja3061479).

Silas describes their achievement this way, “All of the building blocks needed for this synthesis are exceptionally cheap and available on a metric-ton scale,” Cook says. “Is this chemistry ready for supplying the world with artemisinin? No. But with some further reaction engineering, it very well could be.”