The family of silly-sounding hydrocarbons featuring cyclobutanes, like basketane, cubane, housane, and ladderane, has a new member. Meet mousane—a dispirodecane made of three cyclobutanes that resembles a mouse’s head, according to the chemists who made it and named it (ChemRxiv 2026, DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv.15009866/v1). But mousane might be more than just another addition to the menagerie of molecular oddities; this scaffold offers a way to add rigidity to drug candidates and in doing so could improve their properties. The work is described in a preprint, published before peer review.
“Medicinal chemists are increasingly moving away from flat molecules towards rigid, three-dimensional shapes,” says Michael D. Mandler, a scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb. Mandler led the mousane work along with Richard Y. Liu at Harvard University and Manivel Pitchai at the Biocon Bristol Myers Squibb Research and Development Center.
