Molecular Craigslist

mattoddchem | Intermolecular | April 19, 2012

I think we need an eBay for molecules. Or maybe a Craigslist.

We’ve identified some potent new antimalarials in the open source drug discovery for malaria project that are already being investigated in vivo. The series seems interesting, and we may need to explore it fully if the biological results are good. We may need to make a bunch of analogs, but we don’t want to spend time making molecules that are commercially available. Iain Wallace has been doing some lovely analysis of which compounds similar to the new hits are commercially available.

I had a very interesting meeting at UCSF Mission Bay with John Irwin this morning which made me realize we ought to be using Zinc more. A quick search around our most potent hit threw up these commercial compounds, for example. We ought to check them out.

Given we can identify relevant, commercial compounds we now need to contact suppliers to see if they might donate.