Congratulations to Keary, who was selected as a recipient of the prestigious 2018 Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award. The prize is awarded by an independent scientific committee of Bayer Science & Education Foundation and will be presented on June, 25 at the Bayer Foundation Day in Berlin. Congratulations to Keary and the entire Engle lab!

For a link to the Bayer press release, click here.
For a link to the TSRI News & Views highlight, click here.

Our manuscript describing a method to achieve catalytic, enantioselective 1,4-hydroboration of 1,3-enynes was accepted for publication in ACS Catal. Congratulations to the authors, De-Wei, Yiyang (Elaine), Mingyu, Zhen, Malkanthi, Jason, and Keary. We would also like to acknowledge our collaborators at Boehringer-Ingelheim, Dan Fandrick, Jeff Song, and Chris Senanayake, for valuable discussion and guidance. BI has a longstanding interest in allenyl boronates and related organoboron nucleophiles. (For representative papers, see: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 7600; Org. Lett., 2010, 12, 88; Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 5616). Their interest in and experience with this family of compounds played an important role in the genesis of this project, and the Engle lab is looking forward to many stimulating interactions with the BI team moving forward. Click here for a link to the paper. A pre-print of this work was previously published on ChemRxiv (click here).

(not pictured: Yiyang (Elaine) and Mingyu)

Andrew, Tanner and David headed up to OC for the day to help judge the high school and junior high county science fair. We awarded the “Engle Lab Prize” to an individual who did not get the result they wanted but showed persistence and dedication to their research. In the senior division we awarded the prize for the work done on monitoring sugar conversion in bananas by varying ethylene levels, and in the Junior division for the poster on measuring “sugar” concentration of different types of sugar by quantifying the amount of CO2 produced during fermentation. Congratulations to the winners of the Engle Lab Prize and all the other participants for their great work!

Together with a team from Pfizer Medicinal Chemistry Oncology, we report a new method to append cyclopropyl groups to phenols and aza-heterocycles via Chan–Lam coupling in a manuscript appearing today in J. Org. Chem. The transformation exhibits good functional group tolerance with compatibility with functional groups and heterocycles that are commonly encountered in drug discovery. Using computational ADME tools, we also dug into Pfizer’s data to explore the effect of various cyclopropyl-to-alkyl transforms on clearance rates, illustrating the unique properties of the cyclopropyl group in drug discovery. Congrats to the entire team, Joe, Miriam, Matt, Mark, Ryan, Fen, Michelle, Indra, and special thanks to all the folks from Pfizer for a great collaboration! Click here for a link to the paper.

(not pictured: Mark)