The role of the tropane skeleton in drug research

This review describes certain reminiscences about an area of chemical pharmacology I have been involved with, on and off, for many years. Specifically it focuses on tropane, a fascinating, naturally occurring bicyclic chemical ring system that lends itself to many pharmaceutical and therapeutic applications. My involvement with the tropane ring has started more than 60 years ago in 1949, when, as a young assistant in the Institute of Pharmacology at the Medical Faculty of the University of Budapest, I started out to probe into some, yet unexplored chemical pharmacological aspects of the best known tropane alkaloid, atropine; which is the tropic acid ester of tropine, the simplest, naturally occurring tropane compound, the structure of which is shown in Figure 1.