A concise enantioselective synthesis and cytotoxic evaluation of the anticancer rotenoid deguelin enabled by a tandem Knoevenagel/conjugate addition/decarboxylation sequence

The authors thank Dr Andrew Mazar, Dr Irawati Kandela, and the Developmental Therapeutics Core of the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute for their help with the biological screening assays. This work has been supported by the American Cancer Society (Research Scholar award 09-016-01 CDD). R. L. F. thanks the NIH for a predoctoral fellowship (F31CA138097), as well as the Malkin Scholars Program for a cancer research grant. We thank John Roberts and Michael Wang (NU) for assistance with X-ray crystallography. Purification support was provided by the Center for Molecular Innovation and Drug Discovery ChemCore (supported in part by an NIH instrumentation grant, S10RR025690) and the Chicago Biomedical Consortium with support from The Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust (Lever Award). Funding for the NU Integrated Molecular Structure and Education Research Center (IMSERC) has been furnished in part by the NSF (CHE-9871268).