Over the years there have been several claims of "metal-free" versions of coupling reactions that are typically catalyzed, and it's safe to say that most (all) of these have come to grief eventually. The lesson that people are gradually learning is that it's very, very hard to ensure that your system is actually free of metals! Some of these reactions...

Here's one of those massive chem-bio discovery papers that will probably never stop seeming like science fiction to people like me who started in this work in the late 80s and early 90s. It's from several groups in Vienna in collaboration with Pfizer, and it's exactly what the title promises: a large-scale chemoproteomics effort, done with a fragment-sized...

There are several stands of Sanguinaria canadensis blooming right now in the back yard here. It's a native woodland flower commonly known as bloodroot, but we owe its density in our yard to the efforts of my wife, who's a member of the local garden club. Bloodroot is a very early spring flower here in the Northeast, and sends up its blooms before its...

We're still learning about how proteins interact with small molecules, with each other, and with the solutions that they sit in. Witness this recent paper, which quantifies an effect that has been showing up in other biophysical studies (such as NMR and single-molecule microscopy). Positively charged proteins just don't seem to diffuse around as much...

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...