The Synaptic Leap

This page details the various approaches to rac-PZQ

Dear All,
I am a PI at the Stanford University School of Medicine (med.stanford.edu/labs/michael-hsieh) who's seeking a postdoctoral fellow to help develop novel models of urinary schistosomiasis, which, as many of you know, is a "doubly neglected" tropical disease, in part because of difficulties with existing models. Interested candidates may contact me at: mhhsieh@stanford.edu. Please feel free to share this announcement with others who may be potentially interested. Looking forward to working with everyone on collaborative projects in the near future.
Sincerely,
Mike Hsieh

This page details attempts to optimise the purification of praziquantel by chromatography, with an emphasis on preparative, rather than analytical, work. Anybody can add to/edit this page.
 
Literature
1. This paper describes the purification of enantiopure PZQ using "chloroform/methanol 0–0.3% MeOH as a solvent system."
2. This paper uses 1:1 EtOAc/petroleum ether ramping to pure EtOAc.

This page details attempts to optimise the recrystallization of praziquantel. Anybody can add to/edit this page.
 
Literature
1. This patent (US patent 4,523,013) recrystallizes PZQ from "a mixture of petroleum ether and acetone," obtaining a 95% yield on the reaction.
2. This paper recrystallizes from ethyl acetate and hexanes to obtain a 70% yield on the reaction.
 
The best system the Todd lab has observed for the recrystallization of racemic praziquantel, as of Oct. 26, 2009, is the following:

This is a parent page for improving the current methods for the purification of PZQ.

Cameron Neylon has initiated an experiment in the open assembly of a paper on how the aggregator site FriendFeed is impacting the way we collaborate/do science. The background to the call can be found here, and the abstract is being assembled here. This is an open paper-writing project, so please feel free to chime in.

There has been an interesting conversation over at Friendfeed about the value of centralised vs. decentralised synthetic procedures for chemistry. i.e. should we try to create a store of chemical reactions, or ought we to be expecting decent search tools to be able to find these for us, wherever they are. From my perspective, both have value. Naturally what we need are tools that understand descriptions of reactions that are semantic (plain English), and which can understand various forms of data that go along with compounds.

Another interesting PZQ paper has come out of the cell biology group at the CNR in Rome, concerning the mode of action of PZQ. Using radioactive calcium, the group have demonstrated that calcium influx in itself is not enough to kill parasites. Pre-incubation with cytochalasin D promoted calcium influx but protected the worms from PZQ's schistosomicidal effects.

Deepak Singh has very recently started:-