Professor Max Hansmann Wins Proof of Concept Grant
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Medicines are often made up of flat, two‑dimensional building blocks from organic chemistry, which are usually linked to one another via a carbon-carbon bond (C-C) or a carbon-nitrogen bond (C-N). Professor Hansmann and his team are working to make three‑dimensional organic compounds usable for drug development. Such active‑ingredient structures have the advantage of improving pharmacokinetic properties - for example, by being more water‑soluble or more metabolically stable. The binding pockets of proteins, which are frequently the target of medicines in the body, can also readily bind spatially complex active‑ingredient molecules. In pharmaceutical chemistry, there is therefore great interest in integrating new three‑dimensional structural elements into active ingredients in order to develop even more efficient medicines.
This is where the SPIROPENT project comes in: the researchers in Professor Hansmann’s group will develop three‑dimensional core structures that can be applied in active‑ingredient molecules. To do so, they make use of what are known as spiro[2.2]pentanes. These are organic compounds in which two rings, each made up of three carbon atoms, are joined to one another via a shared central carbon atom. “We will analyse the synthesis of the new building blocks in detail and explore their use in pharmaceutical chemistry, with the aim of developing novel molecular building blocks that could be used in modern medicines,” says Hansmann. His team had already developed the method required for this in 2025, publishing it in Science and patenting it. It makes it possible to insert carbon atoms into organic core structures in a targeted manner. Building on these findings, the SPIROPENT project will now produce a series of new three‑dimensional structures.
About the person
Professor Max Hansmann has been Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at TU Dortmund University since 2023. In 2019, he had accepted an appointment as junior professor with tenure track at TU Dortmund University, and from 2020 he headed an Emmy Noether early‑career research group. In 2022, he received an ERC Starting Grant for the project CC‑CHARGED, under which he is investigating fundamentally new classes of substances in organic chemistry.
ERC Proof of Concept Grants 2026
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