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Derek Lowe
Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases. To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com Twitter: Dereklowe

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April 30, 2010

Rating The Chemical Offerings

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Posted by Derek

I'm working on breaking out the "Rate The Chemical Supplier" posts into a separate area for reference. But here's another interesting contribution in that area. This paper looks at several of the big compound-library suppliers, and evaluates their collections based on compound uniqueness, physical properties, etc.

The take-home? Suppliers seem to have paid more attention to making unique compounds over the last few years, in attempts to stand out from the herd. The percentage of compounds with roughly drug-like properties has increased a bit since 2006 (with Enamine running high and SALOR running low), although the ones with lead-like properties (smaller, etc.) has gone down a touch over the same period (Chembridge and Enamine are probably two of the best in that regard). And the different suppliers actually vary quite a bit in the diversity of their collections: Life Chemicals and AMRI, for example, tend to have larger clusters of similar compounds, while Peakdale and Oakwood have many more singletons. (Whether these are bugs or features depends on what you're looking for). If you're buying large numbers of diverse compounds for screening, the paper's definitely worth a look.

Comments (6) + TrackBacks (0) | Category:


COMMENTS

1. Robert Bruce Thompson on April 30, 2010 12:13 PM writes...

Speaking of Chinese chemical suppliers, I remember several years ago doing a Google search for astatine chloride. I was surprised to see that at least one one of the Chinese suppliers was offering it in 500 g and kilogram quantities. IIRC, it was only something like $8,000 per kilo. The only downside was that delivery was 30 days. I just searched again and didn't find any on offer, so apparently they're out of stock on it now.

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2. John Harrold on May 2, 2010 7:48 AM writes...

It's substantially more involved, but something like reseller ratings (http://www.resellerratings.com/) may be more useful. I say this because while company A may be good at supplying stuff now, however management changes or productions issues may make a good rating now useless in the future. The ratings page above can break stuff down over time and by category (customer support, shipping time, pricing, etc), provides statistics (medians ratings, standard deviations), allows for individual commenting, etc.

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3. John on May 3, 2010 7:44 PM writes...

Derek,
May I suggest that you leave rating suppliers to people who are competent enough to do so and have the skillset (such as outsourcing specalists or procurement specialists). You have neither the skillsets or intelligence for such a task.

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4. sgcox on May 4, 2010 3:54 AM writes...

#3 Had a bad day, John?

I like Enamine collection. In our database of ~2M compounds from reliable suppliers, Enamine is certainly most unique and diverse set.

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5. Hap on May 4, 2010 10:15 AM writes...

John,

May I suggest that you leave criticizing drug blogs (or anything else that requires three or four brain cells to criticize reasonably) to those who are competent and intelligent enough to do so? You might hurt yourself.

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6. CZ ODOC on August 12, 2011 3:53 AM writes...

We,Changzhou ODOC International(www.odoc-co.com), dealt with some of the vendors you wrote as a chemicals supplier for their orders from China. They request good quality, price, and delivery. Sometimes they may do not have the goods listed and really have to order abroad, e.g.5-Amino-2-(trifluoromethyl)pyridine.

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