Back in 2010, Halaven (eribulin) was approved by the FDA, and I noted at the time that it was surely the most synthetically complex drug substance that had ever made it to market. Now the chemists at Eisai are back with another related compounds that is even tougher (see at right). This new paper details development of its scale-up route (more here and...

News has come of the start of a new AI-centric biopharma company, Xaira. They say that have over a billion dollars in funding lined up from ARCH Venture Partners and a number of other investors, and there are a number of marquee names involved (such as David Baker and his protein-design group at Washington). Interestingly, the head of the new company...

This new paper doesn't bear directly on medicinal chemistry or drug development, but it does shed some light on a problem that's very much on the mind of anyone who's worked on antibiotics: the nastiness of post-surgical infections, and their origins. Now, modern surgical protocols are of course designed to limit such adventitious infections. Indeed,...

There is clearly a terrible need for more effective therapies for drug addictions, but one of the problems is that biochemically, we don't understand it well enough. It seems well-established that drugs of abuse manage to work into the brain's reward system, and at this point many people will say "Oh yeah, dopamine", and while that's probably fair enough,...

The title of this new paper ("Formation of an Impossible Molecule") is a bit of an oxymoron (edit: fixed my figure-of-speech), since if such a molecule forms, hey, it isn't impossible. But I can forgive the authors, because methanetriol (CH(OH)3) is a pretty unlikely beast. Carbon atoms with a single OH on them are everywhere, and chemists will be familiar...

I mentioned yesterday how there's a fair amount of the chemistry literature that's just wrong, and I wanted to expand on that today. First off, it's not like this is unique to chemistry - all the sciences have this problem, and to some extent, it's unavoidable. After all, we're in the business of discovering new things, and not all of our data are going...