Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
Let’s do some pure chemistry today, because an interesting paper has come out about a reaction that every student learns about in their sophomore organic chemistry course: the Birch reduction. It’s a powerful technique that will do some things that very few other reactions will do for you (such as break up the aromaticity of… Read More
Time for a word about screening for new coronavirus drugs. Things have gone on long enough for quite a few groups to produce supplies of the various viral proteins and set up small-molecule screens against them. That’s no bad thing in itself, although it is a slow thing, a very slow thing by the standards… Read More
Let’s talk antibodies. Mounting an antibody response is crucial for anyone to overcome a challenge from an infectious pathogen, and the immunity that can result is crucial for entire communities and populations. Determining who has such immunity is furthermore going to be crucial for us as we come out from under the current pandemic. If… Read More
Many roots of organic chemistry, and of medicinal chemistry in particular, often originate in what might seem like an unlikely place: the dyestuff industry of the late 19th century. I had already known this to some degree, but writing the historical vignettes in The Chemistry Book really brought it home to me. And if you… Read More
Well, since I mentioned just the other day (and not for the first time) that determining drug concentrations and localization in cells is a major unsolved problem, I should probably talk about this new paper (a collaboration between groups in Edinburgh and Glasgow, nice to see since their cities are not always collaborative in all… Read More
I will cause no controversy by saying that most of the small-molecule compounds that we develop as potential drugs in this business are rather poorly soluble in water. Every organization I’ve worked in has made the standard jokes about “brick dust” and “powdered Teflon”, and for the well-founded standard reasons. A lot… Read More
Assigning enantiomers (mirror-image isomers of a compound, for the non-organic-chemists in the crowd) can be a pain. By definition, no non-chiral technique can tell the difference between such things, and many of the chiral techniques will just tell you that they’re different, but not which one is which. Take, for example, chiral chromatograp… Read More
Anyone who’s done fragment-based drug design (especially) or who has just looked at a lot of X-ray crystal structures of bound ligands will be able to back up this statement: if you sit down with a series of such structures, all bound to the same site, it is very, very difficult to rank-order them in… Read More
If you’re a chemist, then you like crystallization. I think that’s pretty much a given; I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t appreciate a good crystal, and watching them form out of a solution never stops feeling a bit like magic. When I was doing a project involving metal-organic frameworks, I had some of the best… Read More
Let’s think for a minute about what’s going on with tiny particles in solution, because we chemists spend an awful lot of time dealing with those. These particles vary in size from individual atoms all the way through small molecules, larger biomolecules and polymers, nanoscale engineered particles, micronized powders, etc., but the goo… Read More
