Who will get you there quicker, Fred Flintstone or George Jetson?

Sequoia Sciences identifies novel chemistry from its library of structurally diverse small molecules isolated from plants. The proprietary design of this library allows for the biological screening of these compounds at optimal HTS concentrations, without non-drug-like interferences. Sequoia built this analytical process such that rapid isolation and structure elucidation of active compounds could be accomplished. Sequoia's efforts to date have been to create a high-throughput natural products chemistry program.

The fictitious cartoon characters of the 1960's network television in the United States, “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” will be used to illustrate the ability to create a high-throughput natural products chemistry program without the bottleneck of structure elucidation being the rate limiting step. The improvement of NMR probe technology has created a tremendous sensitivity advantage for today's natural products chemist. From the early days of 5 mm NMR tubes which demanded milligrams of material, to the CapNMR Probe where one could start to realize the sensitivity gains of recording full data sets on 10's of micrograms of material, to the state of the art 1.7 mm MicroCryoProbe.

The scientific strategy that Sequoia employs in order to rapidly uncover the chemical diversity contained in plant natural products for its internal cancer program will be outlined. This presentation will expand upon the ground breaking NMR tube transitions to the CapNMR probe and now the TCI 1.7 mm MicroCryoProbe. An example that was realized from this NMR probe advantage will be presented from Sequoia's cancer program. For the structure elucidation process, this advanced capillary scale NMR cryoprobe acquires complete NMR data sets on micrograms (10ugrams) of material. The MicroCryoProbe technology compliments its Sequoia's current platform technologies for high-throughput natural products research for its drug discovery program.