Department of Medicinal Chemistry

Research Interests

Fluorinated compounds have important applications in medicinal, agricultural and materials chemistry. The simple replacement of a functional group with an analogous fluorinated substituent can drastically modify various biophysical and physical molecular properties, including oxidative, thermal and hydrolytic stability, solubility, acidity/basicity, dipole moment, polar surface area, and conformational rigidity.

The introduction of fluorinated substituents is challenging and underdeveloped. Traditional fluorination reactions: (1) significantly limit the scope of functional groups tolerated, (2) require specialized equipment and training to conduct, (3) inhibit the ability to introduce a fluorinated group at a convenient or late stage of a synthesis when chemical divergence is important. Improvements in the introduction of the fluorinated functional groups will be useful for the discovery of new drug and agrochemical agents, as well as the preparation of new materials.

Research in the Altman group focuses on the development of mild and user-friendly strategies to install fluorine into organic molecules, and application of these new methodologies to the synthesis of medicinally relevant targets.