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 "Chemical News"

• Chemical News

  CDK Inhibitors: Purchase With Caution

  10 October, 2018

  Cyclin-dependent kinase (CDKs) have been drug targets for quite a while now. There are 20 different ones, and they help to regulate a whole list of important functions, particularly involving the cell cycle (which has made them of great interest in oncology research). There are three approved drugs in the area so far: Kisqali (ribociclib)… Read More

• Chemical News

  Thoughts on the Chemistry Nobel Prize

  4 October, 2018

  I wrote up this year’s Nobel Prize awards in chemistry yesterday, and there’s no arguing that they’re significant achievements worthy of a prize at this level. For many chemists, though, I think that this year’s award will join the 2015, 2012, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004, 2003, 1997, and 1993 ones (and there are arguably even mo… Read More

• Chemical News

  Dissolving One Way And Another

  2 October, 2018

  All right, fellow chemists, you’ve got this hydrophobic/hydrophilic thing down, right? I’m glossing over the fact that our intuition about those things can be wrong, as can much of the software used to estimate it – we at least know about these concepts and have a physical picture of compounds that like to dissolve in… Read More

• Chemical News

  The Enantioselective Ugi

  27 September, 2018

  This is a remarkable result: a group from Shenzhen reports an enantioselective Ugi reaction. If you’re among the majority of the human race that doesn’t know what an Ugi reaction is to start with, it’s probably the best-known of a rather rare category, a four-component reaction. You take an aldehyde (ketones can work, too), an… Read More

• Chemical News

  Simple Rings, Simply Wrong

  26 September, 2018

  Medicinal chemists spend a lot of time thinking about the relative greasiness of their molecules. Being professional scientists, of course, we have come up with some slightly more quantitative phrases than “relative greasiness”, but that’s definitely the idea. How hydrophilic/hydrophobic a compound is determines not to what extent… Read More

• Chemical News

  Versatile Optimization, While You Wait

  24 September, 2018

  You’ll have noticed that scientific discovery often follows a template set by mathematics. A particular result gets generalized to a class, then other fields grow up around the relationship of that class to other classes and around the various ways to make those sorts of generalizations: higher levels of abstraction. Here are examples of some… Read More

• Chemical News

  New Reactions And Where They’ll Come From

  28 August, 2018

  Here’s a new paper calling for expanding the medicinal chemistry synthetic toolbox. There have been calls like this before, of course, but those weren’t wrong, either. It’s not hard to figure out how we’ve ended up where we are, though (links added to replace footnotes in the below paragraph): The limited set of reaction typ… Read More

• Chemical Biology

  In Situ Click Chemistry For Antibiotics

  23 August, 2018

  I have always had a liking for the technique of having target proteins assemble their own inhibitors. This goes under several names: target-guided synthesis or protein-templated reactions more generally, and in situ click chemistry when the triazole/alkyne reaction is used as the assembly method. But the idea is the same in each case. You bring… Read More

• Chemical News

  Get With the Radical Program?

  15 August, 2018

  I learned the basics of organic synthesis some years ago (at the hands of the recently retired Tom Goodwin, which for those who know him will seem quite fitting). But the way I learned it is still pretty similar to the way that students are learning it now, I think. Looking at textbooks (and every… 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