Chemists have synthesized in the lab a pain-relieving extract from the bark of a tropical shrub, paving the way for new drugs that lack the unwanted side effects of many opiate-based pain meds.
There were hints that the compound, called conolidine, might be an effective pain medication, but studying the stuff has been tough. Isolating conolidine from the bark of the crepe jasmine plant returns pathetically meager yields, and the compound’s particular ringed structure has made lab synthesis difficult. Now researchers have overcome those difficulties and constructed conolidine in the lab from a cheap and readily available chemical building block. The molecular Tinkertoy-like construction is accomplished in just nine steps and yields large quantities of the compound, researchers report online May 23 in Nature Chemistry.
Extracts from crepe jasmine, Tabernaemontana divaricata, have long been used in traditional medicine, but how this particular compound alleviates pain remains a puzzle. Despite its name, the plant isn’t closely related to scented jasmine. Instead it comes from a plant family rich in alkaloids, compounds that are often poisonous but have been commandeered as medicine for treating malaria, cancer and other maladies.