Rice lab first to mimic molecule found in poppies. Undergraduate leads synthesis of scarce extract, possible drug precursor

A Rice University undergraduate student’s grit and talent paid off in a big way when she introduced the first synthesis of a rare and potentially potent molecule drawn from poppies. 

Anavi Serna, a junior, spent the duration of a summer fellowship in the Rice lab of synthetic chemist László Kürti chasing a sequence that would produce setigerumine I, an alkaloid molecule found in trace amounts in the poppy family Papaveraceae.

That natural setigerumine is a molecule the researchers described as “obscure and elusive,” and so hard to isolate it’s difficult for labs to study the molecule as a possible precursor for drugs or other products. But it was an apt target for Kürti’s lab, which develops or simplifies chemical paths for the synthesis of pharmaceutical building blocks used in drug design and manufacture.

Ultimately, Serna and her mentor, Rice chemistry lecturer and corresponding author Juha Siitonen, produced the natural product in a three-step, room temperature process that started with oxidizing and rearranging a precursor molecule, noscapine, found in cough syrup.

Siitonen, who will become an assistant professor of organic chemistry at Aalto University in his native Finland in January, had been looking at setigerumine I, first isolated in 1993, and several other rare poppy extracts for a while. 

“Because this molecule is isolated from poppies that also produce morphine, the likelihood that it has desirable biological properties is pretty significant,” Siitonen said. “We’ve been facing an opioid crisis for years now, so we clearly need better painkillers that are non-addictive. We don’t know if this is the one, because we’ve only just made it, but it might prove practical.”

The team’s paper appears in the journal Angewandte Chemie.