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.
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
Designing useful catalysts is one of the most challenging frontiers in chemistry, and it stretches across the whole field. Inorganic, synthetic organic, analytical, computational – you name it, and there’s a challenge there to pitch in on. The rewards are substantial. Without catalytic reactions, the modern world economy would come to a… Read More
I mentioned polymorphs the other day, and no mention of those should go by without a reference to the classic 1995 article on “disappearing polymorphs” and its 2015 follow-up. This is a controversial area, but what everyone can agree on is that there are numerous cases where some particular crystal form of a compound has… Read More
Here’s a surprise: a report of a completely new (and rather unusual) allotrope of carbon. There doesn’t appear to be a manuscript out there yet, but the results were presented earlier this month at a conference in Richmond and earlier this year at the APS meeting, and caused a stir. Weirdly, this one appears to… Read More
We’re seeing a lot of bivalent molecules in drug discovery these days, especially with the popularity of bifunctional protein degrader ligands. The general structure of such thing is (ligand)—-linker—-(ligand), with the two ligands chosen (in the case of targeted protein degradation) to bring a ubiquitin ligase complex up close to… Read More
If you’re a chemist, then you like crystallization. I think that’s pretty much a given; I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t appreciate a good crystal, and watching them form out of a solution never stops feeling a bit like magic. When I was doing a project involving metal-organic frameworks, I had some of the best… Read More
Let’s think for a minute about what’s going on with tiny particles in solution, because we chemists spend an awful lot of time dealing with those. These particles vary in size from individual atoms all the way through small molecules, larger biomolecules and polymers, nanoscale engineered particles, micronized powders, etc., but the goo… Read More
Here’s a weird one for the Strange Things to Do With Chirality file. A multi-center team (Hebrew Univ., Weizmann Inst., Univ. Modena, and Pitt) report that electron spin, of all things, can be a chiral reagent. Some readers will sit up at that phrase, and others will (understandably) wonder what I’m talking about. Perhaps that… Read More
Kekulene! This is one of those molecules that someone who’s learning organic chemistry might sketch out on a whiteboard, wondering if it really exists. It does, but it’s not like we have a lot of recent information about it. There was a preparation of it in 1978 (from the Staab group at the Max-Planck Institute… Read More
OK, let’s talk about something with pretty much no practical relevance whatsoever: the element copernicium. That’s #112, just below mercury in the periodic table, and its longest-lived isotope has a half-life of 29 seconds. Which is actually pretty impressive – that’s one of the longest-lived elements up there at those atomi… Read More
