Carbohydrate biomass is an abundant renewable resource which has enormous potential for the synthesis of valuable chemical building blocks. The sugars present in this material are of particular interest as a functionalised carbon source to produce chiral saturated heterocycles which are of widespread potential utility in pharmaceutical development. Whilst there are many well-established methods for converting sugars into chiral heterocycles such as tetrahydrofurans (THFs) and tetrahydropyrans (THPs), these typically rely on lengthy synthetic sequences involving the extensive use of protecting groups and high cost/energy reagents (e.g. Tf2O). They are, therefore somewhat resource-intensive and relatively inefficient approaches, especially for the large-scale preparation of chiral building blocks, and chiral heterocycles derived from sugars remain relatively underexplored in drug discovery applications. The development of more efficient and sustainable synthetic routes to chiral building blocks from sugars is therefore of great interest, particularly if the use of protecting groups and high-cost reagents can be minimised or avoided. In this context, the identification of reactions that can be used to achieve the regioselective dehydration of sugars without the need for protecting groups is particularly important. Notably, the selective removal of one or more hydroxyl groups from the sugar backbone will lead to molecules with inherently more useful properties for pharmaceutical applications.