Infections caused by
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
kill more than 1.8 million people each year. While the persistence of this pathogenic bacterial species and the emergence of multidrug resistant strains have created an urgent need for new TB therapies, a new TB-specific drug has not been developed in over 40 years. The disclosure herein provides short and scalable syntheses of small molecules, and small molecules as new therapeutics for eradicating this life threatening pathogen.