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.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Analytical Chemistry"

• Analytical Chemistry

  How Close is Cryo-EM To Riding Over the Horizon?

  14 August, 2018

  OK, all this cryo-electron microscopy stuff is great, new protein structures, things that are huge, that can’t be crystallized, fine, fine: but when, the medicinal chemists in the audience ask, will we be able to use it for structure-based drug discovery? This new review tries to answer just that question. The first thing that you… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Cooling Crystals is Great. Except When It Isn’t.

  25 July, 2018

  If you’ve ever been around an X-ray crystallography setup, one of the constants is a tube directing a blast of chilly vapor at the crystal that’s mounted for analysis. It’s usually a stream of cold nitrogen gas, often set up as a blast of the cold stuff surrounded by a second concentric layer of dry… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Entropic Term is Laughing At Us

  11 July, 2018

  There are plenty of things to optimize in a med-chem project other than binding affinity. But if you don’t have at least some level of binding, you may not have a med-chem project. And while from the outside, you might think that understanding how and why compound A binds to a given target while compound… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Covalent Organic Frameworks

  9 July, 2018

  Let us pause to consider the weirdness of diamond. Not because diamonds are rare – they’re not, at least compared to many other minerals and gemstones. But diamond itself has very unusual physical properties, and that comes down to its structure. As is well known to chemists, it’s a three-dimensional lattice of bonded sp3 carbons… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Phosphoproteomic Landscape Speaks – What Did It Say, Again?

  5 July, 2018

  Medicinal chemists are extremely familiar with G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), and it’s a safe bet that any pretty much any neurotransmitter (for example) that can be named by the general public is a GPCR ligand, too. Serotonin, dopamine, histamine – all the classics are there, and that’s reflected in the number of marketed d… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Complex Organics Are Out There – Again

  29 June, 2018

  There’s no way, as a chemist and telescope owner, that I could let this story go by. A new paper reports mass spec data from ice grains that have been sprayed from Saturn’s moon Enceladeus, and let’s just say that there’s a lot of stuff in them. Enceladeus and Europa (a broadly similar moon around… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Looking Way Down Into the Cells

  20 June, 2018

  Pharmacokinetics – the study of how drugs are taken up, distributed, metabolized, and cleared – is obviously a key part of drug development. Every drug substance gets handled somewhat differently by the human body, and these differences can completely determine whether you’ve got an effective therapy or not. But the tools we have… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Organometallic Oddities

  29 May, 2018

  Synthetic organic chemists spend a lot of time using organometallic coupling reactions, because they can be such great ways to make carbon-carbon (and carbon-heteroatom) bonds. And that’s the currency of the realm: do you want to build up larger molecules from smaller precursors in a controlled fashion? You’re going to have to make bond… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Clicked DNA: From Lab Curiosity to Analytical Technique

  21 May, 2018

  I’ve written a few times about an odd sort of unnatural DNA sequence, where some of the nucleotides are connected via “click” triazole units rather than the traditional polyphosphate backbone. I remember wondering what the chemical biology community would make out of these things, and I wanted to report on at least one ingenious a… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Chiral Separations With Magnets. No, For Real.

  17 May, 2018

  Now here is something I didn’t expect: what may well be a completely new way to separate enantiomers, not based in any way on shape recognition versus another chiral substance. [Quick background for those not in the field: a great many three-dimensional molecules can exist in right-handed and left-handed mirror-image forms (enantiomers), exac… Read More