Recent advances in carbapenem chemistry

The discovery of thienamycin in 1976 caused much synthetic research effort to be concentrated, on carbapenem antibiotics, by many research groups. To date, three carbapenem antibiotics: imipenem, panipenem and meropenem have been developed for clinical use resulting from progress in synthetic methodology. Today, much attention has been directed towards development of next generation carbapenem antibiotics. Recent syntheses of the carbapenem skeleton and a variety of substituted carbapenem derivatives are reviewed in this paper. Some structure-activity relationships on carbapenem antibiotics are also briefly described.