(–)-Tetrodotoxin

At my industry day job, I’ve often seen a process chemistry team struggle to pick a route to a drug candidate. While they might have five objectively good routes to choose from, they must ultimately pick just one and it often seems that ‘best’ is in the eye of the beholder. You see, commercial route selection is a multiple variable problem and it’s not uncommon to see teams pass over a shorter route in place of an operationally simpler one, or a cheaper one in favour of a safer one.

In academia, the selection pressures are certainly different, but the aim is still to end up with the best route – whatever that means. Aphoristically, it’s often said that comparison is the thief of joy, but I’ve always enjoyed contrasting the different routes that research groups devise to conquer a natural product. Popular targets with a large number of reported syntheses are a unique learning opportunity as we get to see how different chemists attack the same problem.