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 talk crystals for a few minutes. Those of us (like me) who are familiar with chemistry and biology, but who are not crystallographers themselves, will know the broad outlines of X-ray crystallography, and can appreciate its extension to diffracting electrons instead of X-rays. But there are a lot of odd and subtle things that… Read More
I suppose this will be sort of a chemical engineering, scale-up, process chemistry post. . .and most certainly will be filed here under the “How Not to Do It” category. The Bellingcat group (Dan Kaszeta in particular) have a very interesting look at a display in “Patriot Park” (a military-themed destination located in a town… Read More
This is quite a synthetic chemistry accomplishment: the halichondrin derivative E7130 has been synthesized on an 11-gram scale by the Kishi group (open-access paper). I’ve copied that structure directly from the published paper, because there’s just not enough time this morning to redraw it! This would surely be the most complex natural… Read More
I’ve written here about some of the work on high-throughput reaction optimization: setting up dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of small test reactions to investigate the conditions needed to get particular transformations to go in high yields. There are plenty of useful reactions (especially some widely-used metal-catalyzed ones) that can… Read More
The recent post here on automation in chemistry (especially medicinal chemistry) is a good intro for this paper in ACS Med. Chem. Letters. It’s from David Parry, who led Cyclofluidic, and I’ve blogged about them a few times over the years. That was a company formed in 2008 in the UK to try to develop… Read More
Like many organic chemists, I find natural products very interesting, since their structures are often things that I would never imagine making (and in some cases have trouble imagining how to make at all!) But there’s a feature of the literature in that area that not everyone appreciates: the fact that a reasonable number of… Read More
The need for good chemical probes continues, and (sadly) so does the use of crappy ones. That’s what I took away from this recent paper from a multicenter team out of London. They’re looking at commonly used probes for inhibition of N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) enzymes, and it’s one of those good-news/bad-news situations. N-myrist… Read More
Automation in chemistry (especially industrial chemistry) is so pervasive that we hardly even notice it any more. (I have a whole talk that I give that’s partly on that very subject). But what is automation for? That’s the subject of this short piece in ACS Med. Chem. Letters by Jeffrey Pan of AbbVie. The answer… Read More
Industrial chemistry time! Let’s stipulate that the world’s chemical feedstock industries, on the whole, are not what you would describe as environmentally friendly. There are a lot of moving parts, and some of them are definitely better than others (in their use of energy, carbon emissions, and use of renewable resources as starting ma… Read More
I hadn’t realized it, but there are some new elements that have been added to the “essential for biochemistry” list, and they’re a bit of a surprise. (I blogged about odd metals in biology a few years ago). I would guess that anything new at this point would be a surprise – the most recent… Read More
