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"

• Analytical Chemistry

  A Close Look at Fragments

  3 April, 2019

  Here’s a look from the D. E. Shaw research team at fragment binding, and even if you don’t do fragment-based drug discovery, it’s worth a read. That’s because the mechanisms by which fragments bind to proteins are most likely the fundamental ones by which larger molecules bind as well; this is the reductionist look at… Read More

• Chemical News

  Stirring Bar Contamination

  26 March, 2019

  Stir bars – it was the stirring bars all along. That’s the take-home from this paper, which shows definitively that (A) you cannot truly clean one of the things and that (B) the stuff that’s stuck to them can be influencing the next reaction they’re used in. At one level, I think that few organic… Read More

• Chemical News

  Some Natural Product Weirdness

  25 March, 2019

  Let us take a moment to gaze upon the weirdness of natural products. For an organic chemist, these things can at times be startlingly weird, with structures that keep bringing on the “Well, I never would have thought of that” response. I collect especially odd ones as I see them in the current literature, so… Read More

• Chemical News

  Predicting – Or Not Predicting – New Materials

  22 March, 2019

  We chemists would love to be able to do just a tiny bit less chemistry now and then and just let models and simulations tell us what would happen instead. Only every once in a while – you wouldn’t want to obtain such a perfectly accurate picture of chemical and physical interactions that there was… Read More

• Chemical News

  New Chemistry, Making New Things

  19 March, 2019

  In a perverse way, I’m enjoying how modern organic synthesis is upsetting the classic undergraduate sort of test-question syntheses. You know – Grignards, ester condensations, oxidation and reduction of carbonyls, Wittigs, Sandmeyer reactions, Friedel-Crafts, good ol’ hammer-and-tongs bond formation. I had sophomore organic back i… Read More

• Biological News

  Targeting microRNAs

  26 February, 2019

  Medicinal chemists spend the vast majority of their time targeting proteins. Enzyme active sites, receptors, allosteric sites, interfacial sites – it’s one protein after another, to the point that you can mentally assume that your compounds are going to be hitting the familiar landscape of backbone amide bonds, pi-interacting tryptophan… Read More

• Chemical News

  Birch Reduction Without Tears. Or Ammonia. Or Metals.

  22 February, 2019

  The Birch reduction is pretty interesting to run, especially the first time you do it. Liquid ammonia is not a typical reaction solvent, and condensing it off a cold finger always looks a bit like a magic trick. You’ll be standing there with a beaker of sodium or lithium metal pieces (sitting under solvent!), which… Read More

• Chemical News

  Odd Peroxides Indeed

  14 February, 2019

  You know, normally when you start combining interesting or reactive functional groups in the same molecule, you end up with something that’s worse than before. Would I pick up a flask containing a compound that has both a perchloryl ester and a geminal di-azide? I would not, and neither should you, should someone ever be… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Good Stuff Goes One Way. . .

  6 February, 2019

  I’ve always like the idea of aptamers – as generally used, that word refers to oligonucleotides that are selected for binding to something else (a protein target, for example). You get to use all the tools of molecular biology, which means that you can start out from insanely huge numbers of possible binders and select… Read More

• Chemical News

  Defending Drug Synthesis

  29 January, 2019

  This article from Science is a good look at the scientific state of organic synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. It covers a range of topics which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog as well: synthetic advances such as late-stage functionalization, new bond-forming techniques (photoredox chemistry in particular), the intersection… Read More