tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9633767.post2913065313591592601..comments2024-03-25T09:11:17.877-07:00Comments on The Curious Wavefunction: The death of medicinal chemistry?Wavefunctionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14993805391653267639noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9633767.post-45749215363217848172016-02-19T06:01:24.474-08:002016-02-19T06:01:24.474-08:00Unfortunately, a considerable component of the dec...Unfortunately, a considerable component of the decline of medicinal chemistry, correlating to a decline in drug discovery success, likely is due to the ascendance of pharma/biotech leadership that doesn't understand and, as a result, devalues medicinal chemistry. Pharmaceutical company executive suites used to be populated by scientists, including chemists. Now they are almost universally populated with executives drawn from legal, sales and marketing fields - with the occasional scientist coming from biological disciplines. Medicinal chemists have always been masters of multiple drug discovery disciplines, beginning with synthetic chemistry. What has changed is the industry perspective.<br /><br />Since the advent of combi-chem, and the subsequent series of drug discovery fads that have swept the industry, medicinal chemistry has been commoditized in the resulting race to reduce drug discovery to a pure numbers game: more compounds = more drugs. How's that been working out? <br /><br />Making complex compounds is not a simple task - I saw a presentation by Gilbert Stork in the early 1980s where he stated that synthetic chemistry was not stale field and was not close to being so. If it were, he pointed out, a really smart professor could draw a 20-step synthetic sequence to a complex molecule and assign a talented post-doc to the task of making the compound. Assuming an average of 1 reaction per day (a low number that would get most post-docs dismissed), the professor could expect to have the completed synthetic product in hand, complete with analytical data, in 21 days. Clearly, this is not the case even today.<br /><br />It is really great that biological agents are making positive contributions to improving human health, and biosimilars are now beating a path to competition in this field, arguably a good thing. However, there are still plenty of small molecule therapeutics waiting to be discovered and developed. Given the advanced state of modern biology, biochemistry, computational modeling and data handling sciences, design and optimization of new therapeutics, the industry (and scientists in academia, Federal labs, etc) should be screaming for increasingly sophisticated chemist contributions to meet the synthetic challenges. Instead, the call is to increase the commoditization of this (formerly) venerable field science. Seems to be going in the wrong direction. r. frechettehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerfrechettenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9633767.post-71903005966360922392015-12-09T00:41:12.645-08:002015-12-09T00:41:12.645-08:00The worries from Michael is really existing in our...The worries from Michael is really existing in our life. and the medical chemistry nowadays are commoditized. and it does not work well in its field. because many industries are using it abuse. <a href="http://www.creative-proteomics.com" rel="nofollow">CP</a>sabrinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15374855796604217205noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9633767.post-38525666604533296312015-11-30T09:29:06.635-08:002015-11-30T09:29:06.635-08:00Nice post Ash! I am a medicinal chemist inspired ...Nice post Ash! I am a medicinal chemist inspired by all those chemists you mention and then some. As you just pointed out after I left big pharma (rather they left me!), I was perhaps few lucky one to land on my feet and in academia. In addition to the usual chemistry am also doing cell based assay (with a colleague of mine). On top I am also doing some radiation chemistry! But for the fact that the academia usually operate on shoestring budget this would not have been possible. Necessity is mother of all adjustments. Retrospectively, if I knew then what I know now-who knows? Understand that in big companies your suggestion (to a fellow biologist/chemist/modeler) are always welcome but rarely followed through! As a synthetic chemist I also would like to believe that advent of Suzuki, Heck and other C-C bonding pretty much killed the "real chemist." It was so bad that ll those people I interviewed (highly recommended from ivy school) in my previous job were expert @ all those name reactions I mentioned! Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9633767.post-46405796473652549582015-11-30T06:59:55.604-08:002015-11-30T06:59:55.604-08:00Thanks Chris - very interesting work!Thanks Chris - very interesting work!Wavefunctionhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14993805391653267639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9633767.post-73170704382388665982015-11-22T18:31:42.934-08:002015-11-22T18:31:42.934-08:00Terrific post Ash. I've been similarly inspire...Terrific post Ash. I've been similarly inspired with our early projects and collaborations. I should add that I think there is still significant room for creative synthetic strategies and novel methods in complex molecule synthesis to drive important findings in biology (Corey's prostaglandin work is a classic example), even if there are fewer unsolved synthetic problems than there used to be that truly limit our understanding of biology. The Spiegel lab has addressed such a challenge impressively in a recent Science paper we discussed in my lab: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6258/294.longChris Dockendorffhttp://www.marquette.edu/chem/dockendorff.shtmlnoreply@blogger.com