Tilden Prize 2009 Winner

Awarded for his outstanding achievements in the total synthesis of complex natural products.

About the winner

Ian Paterson was born in 1954 in Dundee, Scotland. He obtained his BSc in chemistry from the University of St Andrews in 1976, after which he carried out his doctoral research with Ian Fleming at Cambridge. For part of this period, he held a college research fellowship at Christ's College. 

After receiving his PhD in 1979, he was a NATO postdoctoral fellow with Gilbert Stork at Columbia University before taking up a lectureship at University College London. In 1983, he returned to Cambridge University, where he is presently Professor of Organic Chemistry and a Fellow of Jesus College.

Ian Paterson's principal research interests are the development of new synthetic methods and the synthesis and structure determination of biologically active natural products, and he is well known for his work on the total synthesis of complex polyketides that include anticancer agents and antibiotics. 

He has introduced general methods for stereocontrolled synthesis, including Paterson aldol methodology based on the use of chiral boron enolates for the construction of elaborate polyol sequences with multiple stereocentres. 

These versatile and practical methods have enabled the total synthesis of a large number of biologically important polyketides in the Paterson group, many of which are promising anticancer agents that are in extremely scarce supply from their natural sources, especially those of marine origin. 

Recent examples include: spirastrellolide, spirangien, spongistatin, discodermolide, laulimalide, dictyostatin and reidispongiolide. This synthetic work has enabled extensive biological evaluation of these lead structures and their analogues as novel anticancer agents, and, in the case of discodermolide, facilitated a scalable total synthesis leading to its clinical development.