Multicomponent Reactions with Isocyanides

TLDR

Multicomponent reactions with isocyanides enable rapid construction of large, low‑molecular‑weight drug‑like libraries and are increasingly used for natural product synthesis, offering diverse backbone types and new reaction opportunities. The review aims to help chemists learn the “language” of MCRs.

Abstract

Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) are fundamentally different from two-component reactions in several aspects. Among the MCRs, those with isocyanides have developed into popular organic-chemical reactions in the pharmaceutical industry for the preparation of compound libraries of low-molecular druglike compounds. With a small set of starting materials, very large libraries can be built up within a short time, which can then be used for research on medicinal substances. Due to the intensive research of the last few years, many new backbone types have become accessible. MCRs are also increasingly being employed in the total synthesis of natural products. MCRs and especially MCRs with isocyanides offer many opportunities to attain new reactions and basic structures. However, this requires that the chemist learns the "language" of MCRs, something that this review wishes to stimulate.