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John Taylor

Group Leader (Medicinal Chemistry) at Cancer Research Horizons

There has been not 1, not 2, but 3(!!!) recent papers covering the impact and implementation of photochemical synthesis to drug discovery, which I’d like to take the time to highlight. Firstly, this perspective in OPRD takes an industry-wide view on adoption, looking at a range of different photochemical reactions employed at different stages of drug discovery. Whilst it’s not surprising to see more use in early discovery chemistry compared to development and manufacturing, there is increased interest in larger scale reactions, particularly those enabled by continuous flow chemistry. https://lnkd.in/dURFVpvP This second paper has a much more narrow focus and looks at the implementation of photoredox cross coupling reactions at AbbVie’s Discovery Chemistry function. It’s a great insight in how reducing barriers to adoption can promote the use of enabling technologies. In particular, the use of ChemBeads for dosing catalyst seems like it has great potential to reduce chemists’ inertia to new techniques. https://lnkd.in/dF_vYfJQ Finally, this perspective in J Med Chem does a great job of not only rounding up some of the state of the art in this area, but also highlighting the reasons why photo-chemical reactions can be so impactful in drug discovery. The ability to construct sp3-sp3 C-C bonds with intuitive synthetic logic should help facilitate the delivery of lead compounds with more desirable physicochemical properties. https://lnkd.in/dr-fj3WS Organic chemists are often accused of being somewhat cautious about the uptake of new techniques - hence the main tools of our trade, round bottom and Erlenmeyer flasks, haven’t changed much in around 200 years! Nonetheless, the enthusiastic uptake of techniques such as microwave reactors and automated purification shows that we are open to advances which show a clear benefit – it genuinely feels like certain aspects of photochem are on the cusp of making that transition from cool new technique to everyday part of our toolbox. #chemistry #drugdiscovery

Photochemistry in Pharmaceutical Development: A Survey of Strategies and Approaches to Industry-wide Implementation

Photochemistry in Pharmaceutical Development: A Survey of Strategies and Approaches to Industry-wide Implementation

pubs.acs.org

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