Abstract:
The current global tuberculosis epidemic has shown the need to urgently replace the aged anti-TB
armamentarium. The search for a fast, accurate and reliable diagnosis of active TB has emerged as
the spearhead in efforts to defeat the scourge. Traditional diagnostics that have existed for more than
a century are at best inadequate against the wilier modern forms of the disease like TB-HIV/AIDS
co-infection and the drug resistant TB. The development of mycolic acid based serodiagnostics has
introduced a powerful tool that gives high hopes of solving the diagnostic challenges of a large
percentage of TB cases. To date, these biosensor-based technologies require the immobilization of
MA antigens on a gold substrate for antibody recognition. Several challenges need to be resolved
before these new technologies can be rolled out as affordable and reliable diagnostic tools. This
project sets out primarily to economize the synthesis of MA and develop a new and stable antigenic
surface that will improve reliability of tests.
Chemical knowledge of MA has been growing over the past century but total organic synthesis of
the various forms of these complex molecules have only been achieved in the past decade. This project focused on improving a recently developed synthetic route to the mycolic motif. It
successfully scaled up the synthesis by systematically troubleshooting various aspects of the
synthetic protocol. This resulted in the reduction of the number of reactions by at least 6 steps
compared to the current literature method [Scheme I]. Importantly, this method has the potential of
being extended to the synthesis of much longer fragments of the mycolic acid molecule.
