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.
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
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
