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.
Well, as a chemist – one who does amateur astronomy on the side, yet – it’s obligatory that I write about the phosphine on Venus paper that came out yesterday. This one’s embargo was spectacularly leaky, so everyone who’s really into this stuff had various kinds of advance warning, but the news certainly has made… Read More
So let’s talk robotic chemistry experimentation – that always calms everyone right down, doesn’t it? This new paper in Nature from a group in Liverpool is (at heart) a pretty straightforward implementation of modern reaction optimization, with the added feature that it’s being done by a mobile robot, rolling around the lab… Read More
Now that chloroquine is in the news everywhere, I thought it might be interesting to have a closer look at the compound. The first part of this post will be chemistry-heavy, further down we’ll get into the pharmacology and medical uses. Chloroquine’s fame is as an antimalarial drug, and the history of antimalarials starts of… 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
OK, it’s been a few years since I blogged about this particular weirdness, so let’s do some more. There have been a couple more recent reports of the effects of “vibrational strong coupling” on chemical reaction rates. What the heck is that? There’s some background in that link, but we can hand-wave our way through… Read More
Once in a while I’ll see someone studying undergraduate organic chemistry, and I’ll mention to them that those reactions that they’re learning – well, a reasonable number of them – actually get used out in the real world. (The students are generally surprised by this news). I think that a prototype of this sort of… Read More
The literature of synthetic chemistry is large, and it goes back well over a century. Those of us who know the field sometimes despair of the state that literature is in – it can be pretty messy – but we really shouldn’t. It’s actually far more orderly than many other fields, and it has a… Read More
Phosphorylation is a prime example of a reaction that’s hugely important in biochemistry that organic synthesis struggles with terribly (as opposed to the efficiency and finesse with which it’s handled in by enzymatic processes). The methods used to attach phosphate esters in the flask are frankly pretty crude (all the way up, or down,… Read More
As someone who used a lot of carbohydrates as chiral pool starting materials in grad school, I regard this paper as the next thing to witchcraft. Even folks without carbohydrate experience appreciate readily that there are sugars that you hear about all the time (such as glucose, mannose, and galactose) and some that you hardly… Read More
A few years back here on this site when I would write about synthetic photochemical methods, the reaction in the comments section was, well, mixed. There would be interest, but there was always a strain of “Bunch of academic publications that will never amount to anything in the real world” as well. The amount of… Read More
