Multicomponent Reactions: A Promising Approach to Isotope Labeling

Abstract Isotopic labeling is an attractive modality that has been widely used in many aspects of chemistry, the life sciences, and medical research; especially deuterated drugs and radioactive molecules have been used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. The widespread application and rapid development of isotopically labeled molecules has led to an increased demand for new isotopic labeling chemical methods to synthesize highly specific molecules bearing defined nuclides. Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) are modular build-up approaches for the rapid generation of complex molecules often containing biologically relevant scaffold structures. There is great potential to use MCRs to construct isotopically labeled molecules because assembly speed and reaction diversity are key advantages of MCR. In this review, we provide an overview of the recent literature on this topic that can provide insight into the application of MCRs in the field of isotopic labeling.