A practical and scalable synthesis of KRN7000 using glycosyl iodide as the glycosyl donor

KRN7000 is particularly useful because it is a powerful and specific CD1d agonist and has prompted intense interest in the context of immunology in the past 25 years. Its limited commercial availability and high price has led to the publication of many different syntheses. However, almost all of them focused on the methodology development rather than a scalable synthesis. Herein, we have described a practical and scalable procedure for the synthesis of KRN7000 basing on the glycosyl iodide method. This procedure involves total of eight steps to obtain the highly pure product KNR7000 on gram scale from the commercially available starting materials (d-galactose and the phytosphingosine) with only three column chromatographic purifications.