Nappi

The design of sustainable reactions is one of the most important and challenging objectives that chemists are pursuing in industry as well as academic research. Our research group is dedicated to the invention of new sustainable chemical transformations at the interface of synthetic chemistry, biochemistry and medicinal chemistry. Specifically, our main goal is the practical conversion of organic feedstocks and waste gases into valuable synthetic products. We address this challenge by designing unprecedented photochemical activation modes and reactions, harnessing the renewable energy of visible light.

Currently, we have three active research topics in our lab:

1) Activation and functionalization of alcohols

Cross-coupling reactions have revolutionized the field of synthetic chemistry, enabling the rapid construction of complex molecular architectures from simple organic materials. Despite alcohols being the most abundant functional groups in commercially available compounds and biologically active molecules, only limited deoxygenative cross-coupling processes are available, due to the challenging activation of the C(sp³)-O bond. We work on the invention of new photochemical activation strategies for alcohols, and their use in the development of unprecedent metal-free deoxygenative cross-coupling reactions.

2) Synthetic valorisation of carbon dioxide

The conversion of carbon dioxide into value-added products has emerged as an alternative method to achieve net-zero emissions. While technologies that transform CO₂ into fuels and chemical feedstocks have made great strides, the direct use of CO₂ as C₁ synthon for the formation of new carbon-carbon bonds remains a critical challenge. Traditional methods require the use of highly reactive substrates, transition-metal catalysts and/or severe reaction conditions to activate CO₂.We aim to develop mild photocatalytic systems to incorporate CO₂ into organic molecules.

Synthetic reactions for DNA-encoded libraries (DELs)

DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) represent a powerful technology that has found widespread application in medicinal chemistry as a time- and cost-effective platform for the discovery of new therapeutic candidates. The key aspect is the conjugation of chemical compounds or building blocks to short DNA fragments that serve as identification bar codes. To develop DELs platforms, on-DNA chemistries are required to incorporate multifunctional building-blocks from readily available chemicals. However, the idiosyncratic nature of the encoding DNA results in reaction requirements that are incompatible with a significant portion of the conventional medicinal chemistry toolbox. Given the mild and water-compatible conditions, we use our novel photochemical methods to functionalize DNA conjugates for the synthesis of DELs.