The European Research Council (ERC) has selected Prof. Max Hansmann for a Proof of Concept Grant. In his project "SPIROPENT," he will develop new three-dimensional building blocks for pharmaceutical applications. The 150,000 Euro funding is intended to help translate ideas from ERC projects into practical applications. Prof. Hansmann had previously secured an ERC Starting Grant in 2022, under which he is researching fundamentally new classes of organic chemical substances.
Medicines often consist of flat, two-dimensional organic building blocks, typically linked by carbon-carbon (C‒C) or carbon-nitrogen (C‒N) bonds. Prof. Hansmann and his team are working to make three-dimensional organic compounds available for drug development. Such drug structures offer the advantage of improved pharmacokinetic properties, for instance, better water solubility or greater metabolic stability. Furthermore, the binding pockets of proteins, which are frequently the targets of drugs within the body, are well-suited to binding spatially complex drug molecules. Consequently, there is great interest in pharmaceutical chemistry in incorporating new three-dimensional structural elements into active ingredients to enable the development of even more efficient medicines.
This is where the SPIROPENT project comes in: Prof. Hansmann’s research team will develop three-dimensional structural cores suitable for use in drug molecules. To achieve this, they are utilizing so-called spiro[2.2]pentanes. These are organic compounds in which two ring, each composed of three carbon atom, are linked via a shared central carbon atom. "We will analyze the synthesis of the new building blocks in detail and explore their use in pharmaceutical chemistry, with the aim of developing novel molecular building blocks that could be employed in modern medicines," says Hansmann. His team had already developed, patented, and published in *Science* the method required for this work. It enables the targeted incorporation of carbon atoms into organic molecular frameworks. Building on these findings, the SPIROPENT project will now make it possible to produce a range of new three-dimensional structures.