Since the first pan-HDAC inhibitor SAHA was approved by U.S. FDA 10 years ago, HDACs including SIRT1-7 have received significant attention due to the fact that aberrant histone deacetylase activtiy has been implicated in a variety of human diseases, such as cancers, virus infection, and neurodegenerative diseases. During the past years, a considerable achievement of development of isoform- or class-selective HDAC inhibitors has been made, yielding many drug candidates for further clinical studies, which represents a state-of-the-art technology in the drug discovery arena. Areas covered: This review covers new patents and articles about isoform- or class-selective HDAC inhibitors during the last four years, as well as the therapeutic potential of these compounds. Expert opinion: HDACs represent one of the most promising therapeutic targets, particularly for tumor therapy though their roles in cancer are still blurry. From 2012 to present, along with the advances of structural biology and homology models, lots of isoform- or class-selective HDAC inhibitors, such as hydroxamic acids and benzamides with various capping groups were found, providing a promising way to circumvent drug toxicity and side-effect issues, as well as providing chemical probes for further better understanding of the biological process related to specific isoform.

A redox-neutral, mild, and simple protocol is developed for the synthesis of α-trifluoromethylated ketones from vinyl azides upon visible-light irradiation.

Excising the nitrogen in secondary amines, and coupling the two residual fragments is a skeletal editing strategy that can be used to construct molecules with new skeletons, but which has been largely unexplored. Here we report a versatile method of N‐atom excision from N‐heterocycles. The process uses readily available N‐heterocycles as substrates, and proceeds by N‐sulfonylazidonation followed by the rearrangement of sulfamoyl azide intermediates, providing various cyclic products. Examples are provided of deletion of nitrogen from natural products, synthesis of chiral O‐heterocycles from commercially available chiral β‐amino alcohols, formal inert C−H functionalization through a sequence of N‐directed C−H functionalization and N‐atom deletion reactions in which the N‐atom can serve as a traceless directing group.