Blog

Where no one has gone before

By Vishal Pendharkar

The productivity crisis facing the pharmaceutical industry is known for past two decades. Various strategies are proposed and sometimes implemented to increase the productivity which can be defined as the number of compounds getting into clinical trials and eventually getting approved. In simple terms productivity can be defined as the amount of resource we put in to get one approved drug. One reason for the lack of productivity is the lack of diverse chemical space covered by the compound libraries in the pharma companies.....
Read More


Making Science Click - The idea behind SciClix

By Dr. Vikrant A. Adsool

Back in 2013, right at the onset of my job as a medicinal chemist, I found myself in a checkmate situation wherein replacement of a 1,4-disubstituted phenyl ring was proving to be a major roadblock for the synthetic endeavour at hand. The lead compound that I was working with did a ‘fantastic job’ in vitro but failed miserably in vivo and the aforementioned phenyl ring was the undisputed culprit. At the time of despair, a twisted looking molecular building-block published by Pfizer caught my eye and I desperately wanted to get my hands on it. Unfortunately, it was neither commercially available nor was it easy to make. To make a long and rather painful story short, I focused the next 5 years of my career in synthesizing potentially useful but commercially unavailable building-blocks as the main theme of my research. During this time, my team not only focused on the discovering new routes to such building-blocks, but also on understanding their biological significance......
Read More