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

  Nostalgie de la Boue

  27 December, 2018

  Alfred Bader’s passing reminds me that there’s an earlier generation – now almost completely gone – that regarded the likes of Aldrich Chemical as fancy upstarts. There has (had?) always been a tradition in organic chemistry of making reagents fresh for your own use, either because there were no commercial suppliers (which i… Read More

• Chemical News

  Alfred Bader, 1924-2018

  26 December, 2018

  You didn’t hear much about Alfred Bader in recent years – he was elderly, retired, and moreover, his company (Aldrich, later Sigma-Aldrich) had in recent years dropped the Aldrich name from its public branding and now operates as MilliporeSigma. But if you’re at all connected with organic chemistry in the second half of the 20th… Read More

• Biological News

  Right Side, Left Side

  13 December, 2018

  I wrote here about chirality, on several levels, finishing up with some speculations on how we know our left hands from our right and why. As mentioned in that post, that’s one of those questions that can sound stupid and/or trivial until you start to think about it, and as the comments section proved, things… Read More

• Chemical News

  Ah, Just Pour It Into Salt Water

  10 December, 2018

  Today’s post is one for my fellow organic chemists to wonder over. This new paper from a group at the University of Bari describes a palladium-catalyzed coupling reaction of alkyllithiums and aryl halides. And that in itself is not that remarkable – it’s not easy to get that combination to go, not least because you might… Read More

• Chemical News

  Machine Learning: Be Careful What You Ask For

  20 November, 2018

  Let the machine learning wars commence! That’s my impression on reading over the situation I’m detailing today, at any rate. This one starts with this paper in Science, a joint effort by the Doyle group at Princeton and Merck, which used ML techniques to try to predict the success of Buchwald-Hartwig coupling reactions. The idea… Read More

• Chemical News

  Here’s What’s Been Done Before

  8 November, 2018

  I enjoyed this ACS Med. Chem. Letters perspective on AI and machine learning in medicinal chemistry. It has several good points to make, and it brought up one that I haven’t gone into here before: if you’re mining the literature, you will get what the literature can tell you. At the very best, the high… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Small Molecule Structures: A New World

  18 October, 2018

  Word has been spreading rapidly about this preprint on Chemrxiv.org, from a joint UCLA/Caltech team. It details the use of the cryo-electron microscopy technique called micro-electron diffraction (MicroED) for the structure determination of small molecules, and it’s absolutely startling. I read it last night, with many exclamations along the… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Blue Light Coming Out of the NMR

  17 October, 2018

  I really enjoyed this paper from Merck’s Process R&D group, but some readers will be saying “Yeah, but that’s just because you really enjoy photochemistry reactions”. The latter part is true, but it’s the sort of paper that we need to help drain some of the voodoo out of all the exciting photochemistry work that… Read More

• Cancer

  Replacing Antibodies With Small Molecules

  16 October, 2018

  As anyone who’s been following the oncology field knows, antibodies against either the PD-1 receptor or its ligand PD-L1 are about the biggest things going in the field right now. Hundreds of clinical trials are underway against various tumor types and in various combinations, in the effort to see how far the immuno-oncology idea can… Read More

• Chemical News

  Graphene: You Don’t Get What You Pay For

  11 October, 2018

  Since I was going on yesterday about the need to validate tool reagents, I wanted to note that this problem is not confined to biochemical applications. Here’s an article looking at commercial sources of graphene, the carbon monolayer material that’s been the subject of so much research the last few years. There are a number… Read More