Flow chemistry-enabled asymmetric synthesis of cyproterone acetate in a chemo-biocatalytic approach.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39870623.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-56371-2 and PMC identifier 11772765.
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Abstract
Flow chemistry has many advantages over batch synthesis of organic small-molecules in terms of environmental compatibility, safety and synthetic efficiency when scale-up is considered. Herein, we report the 10-step chemo-biocatalytic continuous flow asymmetric synthesis of cyproterone acetate (4) in which 10 transformations are combined into a telescoped flow linear sequence from commercially available 4-androstene-3, 17-dione (11). This integrated one-flow synthesis features an engineered 3-ketosteroid-Δ<sup>1</sup>-dehydrogenase (ReM2)-catalyzed Δ<sup>1</sup>-dehydrogenation to form the C1, C2-double bond of A ring, a substrate-controlled Co-catalyzed Mukaiyama hydration of 9 to forge the crucial chiral C17α-OH group of D ring with excellent stereoselectivity, and a rapid flow Corey-Chaykovsky cyclopropanation of 7 to build the cyclopropyl core of A ring. By strategic use of these three key reactions and fully continuous-flow operations, cyproterone acetate (4) is produced in an overall yield of 9.6% in 3 h of total reaction time, this is the highest total number of chemical transformation performance in any other continuous-flow synthesis reported to date.