PHARMACEUTICALS AstraZeneca and Roche to share medicinal chemistry data
LISA M. JARVIS · Chemical & Engineering News · 2013
In an effort to improve early-stage drug research, AstraZeneca and Roche have agreed to share data from their medicinal chemistry efforts. The goal is to ease the pain of optimizing compounds, a process that can involve many cycles of drug design, synthesis, and testing before scientists finally have a molecule suitable for human studies. Because small changes to a molecule can have a big impact on properties such as solubility and stability, the idea is to avoid repeating others’ mistakes and exploit successes. MedChemica, a computational chemistry services firm formed last year by three former AstraZeneca employees, will process data provided by the companies. The setup allows knowledge to be shared while protecting proprietary information, like the exact structure of a molecule. The partners want to use “the hard-won knowledge of the past to pinpoint the right changes the first time,” says MedChemica Managing Director Al Dossetter. For AstraZeneca, the ...