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 number of readers have mentioned this new paper by George Whitesides on organic synthesis. I can state as a fact that the first time I heard a joking reference to his attitude towards traditional synthetic organic chemistry was in the summer of 1983, so it’s not like he’s been keeping his thoughts bottled up. Read More
Via Retraction Watch, here’s a situation that I don’t recall seeing before: a group at Foshan University in China published a paper in the journal Natural Product Research on the crystal structure of aspergicine. Here’s the original abstract in PubMed – their work prompted them to revise their previously published structure… Read More
Time to talk natural products for a post. There was a paper earlier this year in PNAS that looked at the entire set of microbial and marine natural producrs reported from 1941 to 2015, looking for trends that might be useful. (Plant-derived compounds were not included, unfortunately, because there was no suitable database as there… Read More
I don’t spend a lot of time on the blog swatting down idiotic ideas about chemicals. It’s a full time job, and (see next post) I already have a full time job. It’s also frustrating work, because the supply of idiocy is apparently beyond limit, and just when you think you’ve seen the most clueless… Read More
I get asked fairly often about natural products in drug discovery – it’s a topic that appeals to reporters and the general public, since the idea of pulling some sort of cure out of the rain forest or a deep-sea coral is interesting and dramatic. (Of course, some of the natural product cures have come… Read More
I last wrote about “cryptic natural products” here – this is the idea that there must be a great many interesting compounds produced by microorganisms that we have not seen yet. It’s for sure that there are many biosynthetic-looking gene clusters found in these species that don’t seem to be turned on most of the… Read More
Determining the structure of a new molecule is one of those things that you’d think would be simple – at least, nonscientists often seem surprised at how much of our time we spend on such problems. (It doesn’t help that dramatic depictions involving chemistry almost invariably skip over this problem in the interest of moving the… Read More
The field of late-stage modification of complex structures has seen several advances in the last few years, and this is just the sort of thing that medicinal chemists tend to be interested in. We like one-step transformations (which organic chemist doesn’t!) and we tend to have large collections of compounds that have already been made. Read More
I really enjoyed reading this article in J. Med. Chem. on curcumin. (Update: here’s the take over at Practical Fragments). That’s a well-known natural product, found in large quantities in turmeric root (which is where most of the yellow color comes from). It has, over the years, been a hit in many, many assays, and… Read More
The virtues and shortcomings of total synthesis are both on display in this new paper from the Baran group at Scripps, “Total Synthesis of Maoecrystal V”. Actually, they’re on display in not only that paper, but in it and in the four previous total syntheses of the molecule, but we’ll get to that. Maoecrystal is… Read More
