What chemical reactions do medical chemists like to use

In the field of drug development, chemists pay close attention to which molecules and reactions are more valuable in the pharmaceutical process. Recently, Novartis Biomedical Research Institute of Switzerland cooperated with a British software company to study the patents published in the United States from 1976 to 2015, revealing what research pharmaceutical chemists have been doing in the past 40 years and the changes in drug development trends. This research result is helpful to understand the most commonly used chemical reactions in drug development.

According to the chemical and Engineering website of the American Chemical Society, most of the data used in previous studies came from scientific journals, laboratory electronic notebooks of pharmaceutical companies, etc. However, the research team believes that more can be found in patent data. Because the traditional view of the industry holds that the chemical methods used to construct novel structures may not be published in the scientific literature, or even published long after.

According to a paper published in the recent journal of pharmaceutical chemistry, the new research used the chemical informatics tool software developed by nextmove software company to investigate 200000 patents approved and applied in the United States, including about 1.3 million chemical reactions and model data. Through text mining, researchers extracted 1.15 million unique whole process response plans from them, including the effects and products of the reactions, and then classified these reactions with an expert system and classified them into some well-known reaction types. It was found that chemists did prefer some reaction types, such as amide bond formation, deprotection reaction or C-C bond formation.

Nadine Schneider of Novartis, who was responsible for this study, and his team revealed the fluctuation of "bread and butter" reaction favored by chemists through calculation and analysis. With the evolution of new strategies and new types of drugs, the research situation has also changed. For example, Suzuki Miyazawa coupling reaction (a main method for constructing C-C bond) has entered the forefront, resulting in a decline in the use of some traditional chemical reactions, such as Wittig reaction for olefin synthesis, while others remain stable, such as Grignard reaction.

In general, compared with 40 years ago, drugs now have larger molecules, more aromatic rings, more hydrophobic, harder, more diverse reaction types, but tend to lower drug production.