Dr. Keith R. Buszek

 Professor of Chemistry

Links More Information Contact Office: 109A SCB Phone: 816-235-2292 Fax: 816-235-5502 E-mail: buszekk@umkc.edu

Current Research Interests

NATURAL PRODUCTS AND PRIVILEGED STRUCTURES

The major goals of this project is the development of innovative combinatorial chemistry.  The focus is on techniques capable of leading to libraries containing molecules that utilize new principles of scaffold design and that are likely to have pharmacological activity based on sound drug design principles.  To accomplish these goals we synthesize compound libraries based on enantiomerically pure, stereochemically well-defined, novel, versatile, and interesting molecular scaffolds that are derived from or inspired by natural products and privileged structures.

 Specifically, we have prepared demonstration libraries based on the eight-membered lactone natural products via ring-closing metathesis (RCM) chemistry.  These analogues are then evaluated for cytotoxic activity against human colon cancer cell lines.  We also are developing a new class of linkers for combinatorial chemistry.

INTRAMOLECULAR ARYNE CYCLOADDITIONS AND REARRANGEMENTS

The long term goals of this research are to understand the structural, electronic, conformational and steric parameters that lead to the various types of interesting and novel intramolecular aryne cycloadditions (IMACs) and complex and important natural products.  To accomplish these goals we are interested in the design, synthesis and investigation of various systems that lead to some of the important classes of IMACs , such as the [4+2], [2+2], and [2+2] with rearrangement, Type II [4+2], and ene reaction manifolds.

POSTDOCTORAL SYNTHESIS TRAINING AND SUPPORT

Our laboratory trains postdoctoral research fellows in the areas of natural product total synthesis and combinatorial chemistry.

Some examples:  synthesis of the powerful antitumor agent octalactin A in large quantities in an effort to find its molecular target and mode of action; second, the synthesis of a series of novel, symmetric potential H2 histamine agonists for use in probing the H2 histamine active site.