Latest Small molecule Stories
Assembling chemicals can be like putting together a puzzle. University of Illinois chemists have developed a way of fitting the pieces together to more efficiently build complex molecules, beginning with a powerful and promising antioxidant. Led by chemistry professor Martin Burke, the team published its research on the cover of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. Burke’s group is known for developing a synthesis technique called iterative cross-coupling (ICC) that uses simple,...
SAN DIEGO, July 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Visionary Pharmaceuticals, Inc., announced today that the company has raised seed round investments from a consortium of Angel Investors. The company is using the capital to develop novel small molecule retinoic acid related orphan receptor (ROR) modulators targeting TH17 T-lymphocytes for the treatment of various autoimmune disorders including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and COPD. Visionary Pharmaceuticals has created...
Developing new drugs is a highly costly and time-consuming process. Of 20 candidates, 19 are normally rejected because they don't work or have unwanted side effects. Now a research team led by Professor Lars Baltzer at Uppsala University has produced a tiny molecular "binder" that has the potential to change this landscape radically.The study, published today in the prestigious journal Angewandte Chemie, presents the concept of a tiny polypeptide consisting of 42 amino acids to...
Synthetic PCR mimic could lead to highly sensitive medical, environmental diagnosticsNorthwestern University researchers have taken another step towards realizing a new class of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) enzyme mimics, opening the door for the development of highly sensitive chemical detection systems that go beyond nucleic acid targets.The blueprint for building synthetic structures to detect and signal the presence of targets such as small molecule medical analytes (signalers of...
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- It's a scientist's dream comes true. They are reporting progress in making drugs that target the "untouchables" among the body's key players in health and disease, according to a new study.There are hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body, many of them with links to human disease. However, only a tiny fraction, about 20 percent of these proteins are considered "druggable," meaning that previous efforts to develop a drug against them had...
BERLIN and BURLINGTON, Mass., June 29 /PRNewswire/ -- caprotec bioanalytics GmbH announced today that it has successfully completed a research collaboration with F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Basel, Switzerland. Under the collaboration research agreement, caprotec used its proprietary CCMS (Capture Compound Mass Spectrometry) technology to analyze the binding characteristics and interaction of one undisclosed drug candidate with its human target proteins. To identify selectively interacting...
Chemists in Mülheim devise a new way of optimizing enzymes for industrial applicationsEngineers are unlikely to tinker with the cooling system if they want to increase the size of an engine. Yet chemists at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research have adopted an approach similar to this in their efforts to optimize an enzyme for practical applications. They substituted two amino acids at a site relatively distal to the biocatalyst's binding pocket, the location where the chemical...
The search for new drug compounds is probably worse than looking for a needle in a haystack because scientists are limited in the size of the haystacks they can rummage through"”time and money make it virtually impossible to screen or search through super-large libraries of potential compounds. This is a serious problem, because there is enormous interest in identifying synthetic molecules that bind to proteins for applications in drug discovery, biology, and proteomics, and larger...
New molecule neutralizes key protein, once thought to be 'undruggable,' with roles in leukemia and other cancersScientists have devised an innovative way to disarm a key protein considered to be "undruggable," meaning that all previous efforts to develop a drug against it have failed. Their discovery, published in the November 12 issue of Nature, lays the foundation for a new kind of therapy aimed directly at a critical human protein "” one of a few thousand so-called...
Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have for the first time successfully reconstituted in the laboratory the enzyme responsible for producing the blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin.The research, published Oct. 23 in the journal Science, could potentially lead to the development of other compounds with similarly beneficial effects.The lovastatin-synthesizing enzyme is one of the most interesting but least understood of the polyketide...
