/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derekb.lowe@gmail.com 2012-02-01T08:26:02-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/01/potassium_hydride_is_not_your_friend.php Noted chem-blogger Milkshake seems to have had a close call with a fire started by a tiny potassium hydride residue. It looks like he made it through without serious injury, but that sort of thing will definitely shake a person... 75421@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2012-02-01T08:26:02-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/31/the_future_of_pharma_yikes.php Someone has been soaking up the atmosphere at a large pharma company, for sure. "Look, I'm a chemist. I thought you hired me to do chemistry. But so far, all I've heard is gibberish. . .don't you do chemistry here?".... 75415@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2012-01-31T10:11:00-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/26/putting_a_number_on_chemical_beauty.php There's a new paper out in Nature Chemistry called "Quantifying the Chemical Beauty of Drugs". The authors are proposing a new "desirability score" for chemical structures in drug discovery, one that's an amalgam of physical and structural scores. To their... 75405@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2012-01-26T07:31:12-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/25/open_office_plans_a_question_or_two.php As a follow-up to that post on open offices (and the others referenced in it), I've had a letter from a reader who wonders the following: (1) How many recent research buildings have been built with open offices, as opposed... 75401@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2012-01-25T07:18:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/23/this_all_too_open_office.php Since the topic of open offices in lab design has come up around here several times, I thought I'd point out this op-ed from the New York Times. It's from the author of a new book, Quiet: The Power of... 75396@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2012-01-23T12:55:19-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/03/the_research_world_staggers_back_to_work.php Let's see here. . .145 messages in the work e-mail queue, but most of them are automated reminders that reminded me of the same thing every day of the break. Now to the lab bench. . .now, that was a... 75357@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2012-01-03T08:34:17-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/09/uranium_eh.php For those of you keeping count of how many elements you've used in your chemical careers, you now have another possibility. This paper suggests that uranyl anions are good for epoxide polymerization, so who knows, they may be good for... 75320@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-12-09T09:01:13-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/07/rating_a_massive_pile_of_compounds.php Here's an interesting exercise carried out in the medicinal chemistry departments at J&J. The computational folks took all the molecules in the company's files, and then all the commercially available ones (over five million compounds), minus natural products, which were... 75261@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2011-11-07T09:08:24-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/10/27/fish_nor_fowl.php Talking about hydrogenation here the other day brought up another thought: there's a point where lab work becomes quite difficult, and there are not a lot of good options to help with that. I'm talking about scale-up work, the grey... 75244@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-10-27T07:36:32-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/10/24/tossing_out_the_1920s_hydrogenators_can_it_be_done.php We organic chemists have always liked the hydrogenation reaction. Take your compound up in a solvent, add a pinch of black catalyst powder, and put some hydrogen gas into the vessel. Come back a few hours later, filter off the... 75237@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-10-24T07:11:00-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/09/13/fifty_years_of_medchem_molecules_what_are_they_telling_us.php I wanted to send people to this 50-year retrospective in J. Med. Chem.. It's one of those looks through the literature, trying to see what kinds of compounds have actually been produced by medicinal chemists. The proxy for that set... 75174@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2011-09-13T02:37:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/09/12/from_the_rscsci_symposium_a_medchem_anomaly.php Well, actually, this might not be an anomaly. Medicinal chemists will have heard of the "magic methyl" effect, where small changes can make a big difference in affinity for a drug candidate. This morning I heard an interesting talk by... 75172@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-09-12T08:15:23-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/08/24/disappearing_information_courtesy_of_aldrich_chemical.php I've been in the lab all afternoon setting up reactions, and that prompts me to write about something that I've been noticing. Is it just me, or does Aldrich seem to be abandoning the practice of putting any useful information... 75150@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-08-24T14:16:03-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/08/09/drug_research_areas_you_wish_youd_never_heard_of.php A conversation the other day got me to thinking: over the course of my career, I've worked in the following therapeutic areas (more or less in chronological order): CNS (dementia, then Alzheimer's), diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity, oncology, anti-bacterials, multiple sclerosis, and... 75123@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-08-09T12:10:17-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/15/high_pressure_the_good_kind.php I was talking with some colleagues about underused synthetic chemistry technologies the other day, and one that came up was high pressure. Here's a new paper from JACS looking at pressure effects on a common reaction (Michael addition), and there... 75048@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2011-06-15T13:09:32-05:00