It's a feat three decades in the making: Harvard University chemists have achieved what a new paper calls a "landmark in drug discovery" with the total synthesis of halichondrin. Known to be a potent anti-cancer agent in mouse studies, and found naturally in sea sponges—though only ever in minuscule quantities—the halichondrin class of molecule is so fiendishly complex that it had never been synthesized on a meaningful scale in the lab.
* This article was originally published here
