acidification: A process that lowers the pH of a solution. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it triggers chemical reactions that create carbonic acid.
alkaline: An adjective that describes a chemical that produces hydroxide ions (OH-) in a solution. These solutions are also referred to as basic — as in the opposite of acidic — and have a pH above 7.
ammonia: A colorless gas with a nasty smell. Ammonia is a compound made from the elements nitrogen and hydrogen. It is used to make food and applied to farm fields as a fertilizer. Secreted by the kidneys, ammonia gives urine its characteristic odor. The chemical also occurs in the atmosphere and throughout the universe.
arsenic: A highly poisonous metallic element. It occurs in three chemically different forms, which also vary by color (yellow, black and gray). The brittle, crystalline (gray) form is the most common. Some manufacturers tap its toxicity by adding it to insecticides.
Atlantic: One of the world’s five oceans, it is second in size only to the Pacific. It separates Europe and Africa to the east from North and South America to the west.
atmosphere: The envelope of gases surrounding Earth, another planet or a moon.
carbon: A chemical element that is the physical basis of all life on Earth. (in climate studies) The term carbon sometimes will be used almost interchangeably with carbon dioxide to connote the potential impacts that some action, product, policy or process may have on long-term atmospheric warming.
carbon dioxide: (or CO2) A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they’ve eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter burns (including fossil fuels like oil or gas). Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.
chemistry: The field of science that deals with the composition, structure and properties of substances and how they interact. Scientists use this knowledge to study unfamiliar substances, to reproduce large quantities of useful substances or to design and create new and useful substances. (about compounds) Chemistry also is used as a term to refer to the recipe of a compound, the way it’s produced or some of its properties. People who work in this field are known as chemists. (in social science) A term for the ability of people to cooperate, get along and enjoy each other’s company.
climate change: Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.
compound: (often used as a synonym for chemical) A compound is a substance formed when two or more chemical elements unite (bond) in fixed proportions. For example, water is a compound made of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Its chemical symbol is H2O.
contaminant: Pollutant; a chemical, biological or other substance that is unwanted or unnatural in an environment (such as water, soil, air, the body or food). Some contaminants may be harmful in the amounts at which they occur or if they are allowed to build up in the body or environment over time.
copper: A metallic chemical element in the same family as silver and gold. Because it is a good conductor of electricity, it is widely used in electronic devices.
develop: To emerge or to make come into being, either naturally or through human intervention, such as by manufacturing. (
dissolve: To turn a solid into a liquid and disperse it into that starting liquid. (For instance, sugar or salt crystals, which are solids, will dissolve into water. Now the crystals are gone and the solution is a fully dispersed mix of the liquid form of the sugar or salt in water.)
ecological: An adjective that refers to a branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. A scientist who works in this field is called an ecologist.
engineer: A person who uses science and math to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need.
filter: (n.) Something that allows some materials to pass through but not others, based on their size or some other feature. (v.) The process of screening some things out on the basis of traits such as size, density, electric charge. (in physics) A screen, plate or layer of a substance that absorbs light or other radiation or selectively prevents the transmission of some of its components.
Himalayas: A mountain system in Asia that divides the Tibetan Plateau to its north from the plains of India to the south. Containing some of the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas include more than 100 that rise at least 7,300 meters (24,000 feet) above sea level. The tallest is known as Mount Everest.
hydrochloric acid: A strong (potent) and corrosive acid formed when hydrogen chloride gas dissolves into water. The human gut produces a dilute solution of this to break down foods.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: , or IPCC. This international group keeps tabs on the newest published research on climate and on how ecosystems are responding to it. The United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization jointly created the IPCC in 1988. Their aim was to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and social impacts.
lye: The common name for a solution of sodium hydroxide. Lye is often mixed with vegetable oils or animal fats and other ingredients to make solid bars of soap.
pandemic: An outbreak of disease that affects a large proportion of the population across much or most of the world.
power plant: An industrial facility for generating electricity.
recall: To remember..
sodium bicarbonate: Also known as baking soda, this white, chemical powder occurs naturally. Its formula is NaHCO3. It also has been used as a natural product to extinguish small electrical and grease fires. When ingested, it can help settle acid stomachs. Indeed, it is the main ingredient of many antacids sold in grocery stores.
sodium hydroxide: A chemical that is used in the production of paper and soap. It is used to make solutions more basic (alkaline).
strategy: A thoughtful and clever plan for achieving some difficult or challenging goal.
system: A network of parts that together work to achieve some function. For instance, the blood, vessels and heart are primary components of the human body’s circulatory system. Similarly, trains, platforms, tracks, roadway signals and overpasses are among the potential components of a nation’s railway system. System can even be applied to the processes or ideas that are part of some method or ordered set of procedures for getting a task done.
technology: The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry — or the devices, processes and systems that result from those efforts.
If you want to think deeply about fire, Andres Tretiakov is your guy. The award-winning science educator, a technician at St. Pauls School in London, recently showed students this spooky effect—fire that absorbs light. For the demonstration, he dissolved table salt in ethanol and lit the vapors. Under normal illumination, that mixture burns yellow because of the characteristic emission spectra of sodium: Valence electrons in the sodium, excited by the heat, fall back to a more stable energy level or ground state, emitting almost monochromatic yellow light at 589 nm in the process. But the sodium also absorbs at that wavelength. Tretiakov placed a sodium vapor lamp next to the beaker, and the flames absorbed that light, becoming an eerie black to our eyes.
Mark Levin is on a roll. In September, the University of Chicago chemist unveiled a reaction that could replace a carbon atom in an aryl ring with a nitrogen atom—a precision edit to a molecule’s core structure that could prove invaluable for medicinal chemists. Now, Levin and his team have unveiled a different reaction that can perform a C-to-N swap in aromatic molecules that already contain a nitrogen atom, such as quinolines (Nature 2023, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06613-4).
Together, the two methods should enable medicinal chemists to make these single-atom substitutions in a swath of common molecules, easing efforts to generate analogues of drug candidates. “This is the problem that I started my lab to tackle,” Levin says.
The method is the latest entrant to the burgeoning field of skeletal editing, which aims to add, delete, or swap single atoms within a molecule’s backbone. Such alterations can have a profound effect on a molecule’s biological activity, by altering its polarity, solubility, or hydrogen-bonding ability, for example. Swapping out carbon in favor of nitrogen is a common tactic for boosting the potency of pharmaceuticals, but in practice these analogues often need to be made from scratch, necessitating the lengthy effort of an entirely new synthetic sequence.
Levin’s graduate student Jisoo Woo led the work to develop a more direct method for making the crucial atom swap. It builds on a light-driven process developed in 2022 by Levin’s team, which deletes a carbon atom from a ring containing an N-oxide group.
Researchers begin the new method by turning a quinoline into its N-oxide and applying light to trigger a rearrangement. They then deploy ozonolysis to break open a key intermediate and use ammonium carbamate to insert a nitrogen atom, eject a carbon atom, and re-close the ring. These chemical operations can all be done in one pot.
The upshot is that a wide variety of quinolines can be converted to quinazolines in typical yields of about 50–90%. As a proof of principle, the team used the method in a gram-scale synthesis of a precursor of belumosudil, a medicine that can prevent complications after bone marrow transplants.
“I think it’s fantastic. The idea of replacing a carbon with a nitrogen has been sought after in medicinal chemistry for a really long time,” says Richmond Sarpong at the University of California, Berkeley, who works on skeletal editing and was not involved in the research.
The method still has some important drawbacks—the reaction conditions can cause undesirable alterations to alkene and ester groups, for example. “But it does give a pretty broad coverage of medicinally relevant chemical space,” Sarpong says. “Despite the limitations, it’s still a powerful tool to add to the toolbox.”
Levin’s team hopes to make both of its C-to-N swapping reactions more generally applicable, so they can tackle a wider array of aromatic substrates, regardless of their substituents or architecture. “I’m not really going to be satisfied until we can do this on any arene,” Levin says.
A report by the advocacy groups Beyond Plastics and International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) says chemical recycling of plastics creates large amounts of toxic waste, contributes to climate change, and is not a sustainable solution to the growing plastic waste problem.
Chemical recycling, sometimes called advanced recycling, breaks down plastic polymers by either pyrolysis into mixed hydrocarbons or depolymerization into monomers. The advocacy groups performed case studies of the 11 chemical recycling plants currently operating in the US and concluded that chemical recycling mainly produces hazardous waste and greenhouse gases and only small amounts of material that could be turned into new plastic.
“US facilities are handling an insignificant amount of waste,” Jennifer Congdon, deputy director of Beyond Plastics and one of the report’s authors, said in a press conference about the report. Of the 11 plants, 3 are operating at large scale. The remainder are pilot plants, operating at rates well below their designed capacity, in the testing process, or otherwise small scale. If all the plants were running at full capacity, they would have the ability to process less than 1.3% of the annual plastic waste produced in the US, according to the report.
Of the marketable products the plants are making, most are oils that, after cleaning, are burned as fuel on-site or are sold to third parties. “Making plastic into fuel to burn is not recycling,” the report says. “According to internationally accepted definitions, plastic to fuel is not recycling. It is a dirty and dangerous disposal method.”
Beyond Plastics, IPEN, and other advocacy groups are hoping that the process will not be included in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. This treaty continues to be negotiated; the third of four meetings is set for Nov. 13-19 in Nairobi, Kenya. Another international treaty, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, does not consider chemical recycling to be recycling.
The American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade association that advocates for chemical recycling, calls the Beyond Plastics/IPEN report “misleading” and “false” in an email to C&EN. An ACC representative says the report ignores newer data. The group cites a recent US Department of Energy paper that found that making plastic with 5% pyrolysis oil creates 18% to 23% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than making plastic with crude oil. The study was funded by the ACC.
Jeremy DeBenedictis, president of Alterra Energy, which operates one of the 11 plants, also says the report contains errors. He points to a line that states Alterra’s plant was releasing close to its air emissions limit while operating at a pilot scale and says Alterra’s emissions were well below the limit. When asked for more information on the purported error, DeBenedictis says he is not able to reply by the publication time of this story.
Melissa Valliant, communications director of Beyond Plastics, notes that the ACC study is based on modeling and prediction data rather than operational data. “Our report is well documented with nearly 600 citations to scientific peer-reviewed articles, records from multiple government agencies, plastics industry trade publications, reputable newspapers, and investigative journals,” she says. “We stand by our findings.”
University of California, Berkeley, biologist Michael Eisen was recently fired from his post as editor-in-chief of open access science journal eLife.
Last week, biologist Michael Eisen was ousted from his post as editor-in-chief of the open access science journal, eLife, which has led to backlash from the scientific community. Some welcomed the decision.
The controversy began on Oct. 13 on the social media platform X, formerly called Twitter, where Eisen shared a satirical article published by the Onion titled “ Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas,” adding that “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @The Onion university.”
Following calls for his resignation and criticism that deemed his tweet hurtful and insensitive toward Israeli scientists, Eisen clarified his comments, stating that as a Jewish person with Israeli family, he was horrified by what Hamas did but also by the collective punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza’s civilian population.
Credit: X (formerly Twitter)
Following Eisen’s initial tweet and social media furor, eLife mentioned in a now-deleted social media post that it takes breaches to the journal’s code of conduct seriously and investigates it.
In a since-deleted tweet, eLife stated that breaches of their code of conduct by journal staff and board members are taken seriously and investigated. Eisen announced via X on Oct. 23 that he was being replaced as the editor-in-chief of the journal for retweeting the Onion piece.
The journal’s board of directors made a public statement Oct. 24 about their decision. “Mike has been given clear feedback from the board that his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife ’s mission,” the statement said. “It is against this background that a further incidence of this behavior has contributed to the board’s decision.”
Nearly 2,000 researchers responded to Eisen’s removal in an open letter that argued the decision would create a chilling effect on freedom of expression in academia.
Needhi Bhalla, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, signed the letter. “I sympathized with the tweet but thought it was insensitive,” she says. However, firing Eisen for it was “seriously problematic” and “an awful signal to send to the scientific community,” she argues.
Another signatory, science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik, resigned from her role as a member of eLife’s ethics committee after the decision. “I felt it was not a hateful tweet,” she says. Firing him, she adds, is “not a response I would have expected.”
University of Dundee’s Federico Pelisch, who was appointed to eLife’s board of directors as an early-career researcher earlier in 2023, also stepped down. “You might think his [Eisen’s] tweets were disrespectful, offensive, out of touch, insensitive, badly timed, etc. This however does not represent an infringement of eLife’s Code of Conduct,” Pelisch writes in an email to C&EN.
Eisen can be divisive, whether it’s decisions about eLife ’s editorial model, calling the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegansan overhyped animal, or for tweeting “F— Israel” in 2018 —prior to joining eLife —in response to Israeli forces shooting Palestinian protestors.
It’s plausible the eLife board has previously taken issue with Eisen’s leadership or found it lacking, says Joshua Dubnau, a neurobiologist at Stony Brook University, who also signed the open letter. “But if they deem this to be the final straw, it still implies wrongdoing,” he adds, “which is also problematic because then it’s also using his speech as the grounds to punish him.”
For Uri Ben-David, a cancer biologist at Tel Aviv University who had called for Eisen’s resignation after the initial tweet, it’s not a freedom of speech debate; it’s about Eisen’s fitness to lead a journal that promotes “core values of open science, open discourse, and inclusiveness.” He thinks it’s legitimate to be critical of Israel and Israel’s policies, but he believes Eisen showed insensitivity in addressing a complex situation. “This is a pattern,” Ben-David says.
While Ben-David thinks eLife made the right decision to replace Eisen, Pelisch listed his concerns about the effects of the move in a public resignation letter. “With so many people, particularly early-career researchers, now being even more afraid to speak out than they were before, a lot of energy will need to go into getting us to the place we were already at,” he says.
Michael Eisen did not respond to multiple interview requests from C&EN, and several eLife board members either did not respond or declined to comment.
UPDATE:
This article was updated on Nov. 1, 2023, to restore missing words to a sentence about Michael Eisen being divisive. The first two examples are decisions about eLife’s editorial model and calling the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans an overhyped animal. Because of a production error, the original sentence rendered the examples as “eLife’s an overhyped animal.”
We’ve spent the past few months getting our systems ready and building a strong community of editors for each journal who will represent the full diversity of the research communities we aim to serve. With our teams in place, we’re excited to begin accepting submissions to each journal and bring the expert knowledge of researchers in these spaces to a broad audience of stakeholders.
For authors who have been eagerly preparing their manuscripts, you can now submit your work to PLOS Complex Systems or to PLOS Mental Health! More information about the journals including research sections, publication criteria, submission guidelines, and our inaugural Editorial Board members are now available on the journal websites linked below.
About the journals
PLOS Mental Health is an inclusive journal led by Editors-in-Chief Charlene Sunkel and Rochelle Burgess, working alongside staff Executive Editor Karli Montague-Cardoso and in collaboration with a diverse Editorial Board. The journal is seeking research that addresses challenges and gaps in the field of mental health research, treatment, and care in ways that put the lived experience of individuals and communities first.
PLOS Complex Systems will bring together leading research of broad significance that facilitates understanding of complex systems in all disciplines, led by Editor-in-Chief Hocine Cherifi in collaboration with our Editorial Board of researchers actively working in the field.
Both journals are intended to bring a broad range of research disciplines and expert perspectives together through broad scopes that facilitate information-sharing and cross-talk among stakeholders. They’re also built on PLOS’ foundation of Open Science principles and will work with research communities to define the practices that improve research integrity, transparency, equity, and visibility in the field.
Making OA publication more accessible
Both journals are supported by PLOS’ institutional partnership models.PLOS Mental Health will use our Global Equity model which provides regionally equitable opportunities for institutions to cover the cost of Open Access publication on behalf of their authors. PLOS Complex Systems will be supported by our Flat Fee model, which streamlines the process for institutions to reduce or eliminate author fees.
Find out if your publication fee is already covered
Authors can check our Institutional Partners page to see if their institution is already a PLOS partner–we’ll be adding details about the new journals this week. Authors whose institution or funder is based in a Research4Life country are automatically eligible for similar publishing benefits and can view our fees page for eligibility criteria and additional publication fee support options.
Keep in touch!
You can help us increase the reach of rigorous mental health and complex systems research and join the discussion by following the journals on X (formerly known as Twitter) @PLOSMentalHlth and @PLOSComplexSys. We want to hear from you!
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I’M WELL, thank you. Or at least I think I am. I have no major illness to speak of, I am of average weight and a recent knee scan showed my joints are sufficiently well oiled. My blood pressure is spot on and I exercise fairly regularly – at least, some of the time. Then again, I have a cough I can’t shake. I don’t feel physically strong. And since I am turning 40, I should really get a mammogram, given my family history of breast cancer.
So, am I healthy? With my “big birthday” looming, I have increasingly found myself wondering about that – about what it is to be healthy and how we can best measure whether we are or not. I had assumed there would be some well-established way to find out. But when I began to investigate, I soon discovered that it is a surprisingly hard question to answer.
That is partly because we now know that many of the metrics we rely on, such as body mass index (BMI), are flawed. But it is also the result of fresh insights into the microbiome and the immune system, among other things. These are giving rise to a whole new raft of tests promising a better gauge of health – from those that probe your gut bacteria or your metabolites to those that provide you with an “immune grade”. So, which of these new tests, if any, should I be turning to for the ultimate health check?
What does it mean to be healthy?
Your common-sense definition of what it means to be healthy probably roughly aligns with…
The Nobel Prize announcements are big events at Chemical & Engineering News. But we find out the winners at the same time as everyone else.
Then, the race is on for our reporters.
This year, staffers Laurel Oldach and Mitch Jacoby took on the task of covering the science prizes. In this episode, they reflect on this year’s winning research in chemistry and medicine and share what it’s like covering some of the most prestigious prizes in science.
C&EN Uncovered, a project from C&EN’s podcast, Stereo Chemistry, offers a deeper look at subjects from recent stories. Check out our reporting on the 2023 Nobel Prizes at https://cen.acs.org/magazine/101/10133.html.
Subscribe toStereo Chemistry now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Executive producer: Gina Vitale
Reporters: Mitch Jacoby and Laurel Oldach
Audio editor: Brian Gutierrez
Story editor: Christopher Gorski
Episode artwork: Milad Abolhasani/NCSU
Music: “Hot Chocolate,” by Aves
Contact Stereo Chemistry: Contact us on social media at @cenmag or email [email protected].
The following is a transcript of the episode. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.< /p>
Gina Vitale: Welcome to C&EN Uncovered. I’m Gina Vitale, subbing in for our regular host, Craig Bettenhausen.
C&EN Uncovered is a podcast project from Stereo Chemistry. In each episode, we’ll take another look at a recent story or set of stories in Chemical & Engineering News and hear from C&EN reporters about striking moments from their reporting, their biggest takeaways, and what got left on the cutting-room floor.
Now, usually in these episodes, we’re talking about a cover story, but in this episode, we’re actually looking at our stories on some of the 2023 Nobel Prizes and going behind the scenes on reporting on the Nobels in general. We are actually recording this podcast on Oct. 4th, the day the chemistry prizes were announced.
Here with me to talk about the prizes are the C&EN reporters who have been covering them, Mitch Jacoby and Laurel Oldach. Hi, guys.
Gina: This year, Laurel covered the Nobel Prize in [Physiology or] Medicine, which was for mRNA [messenger RNA] vaccine research, and Mitch covered the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded for quantum dots. The reason we are talking about the Nobel Prize in medicine in addition to the chemistry prize is because it’s actually quite chemistry related and something that we cover at C&EN a lot. So we brought both of these reporters on to talk about both of these prizes.
Now, let’s just take it in chronological order. The Nobel Prize in medicine was announced first, on Monday, Oct. 2nd. Laurel, can you tell us a little bit more about what this prize was for?
Laurel: Sure, absolutely. So the prize this year was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. This is a prize that has been expected by a whole lot of people since mRNA vaccines made their big debut, to the point that if you watch the press conferences for the physiology and medicine Nobel in 2021 and in 2022, some of reporters’ first questions were, “So why not mRNA vaccines this year?”
So the key advance that these two made: they were looking to turn our own cells into protein factories. But of course, turning your cells into factories to make proteins is exactly also what viruses want to do. And so the innate immune system is pretty good at recognizing efforts to do that.
So if it recognizes something as foreign, then it destroys it. The mRNA never has, then, a chance to become a protein that you want to use to train your immune system—which is what we use vaccines for.
So the key advance that the Nobel committee recognized was that they [the winners] figured out how to modify mRNA that was made in a test tube so that it wouldn’t activate your immune system.
In this case, having pseudouridine instead of uridine in mRNA that was produced in a test tube was enough to reduce that inflammatory innate immune response and allow the mRNA that they injected to turn cells into little protein factories and basically gave the foreign protein a chance to be recognized.
It can also be used to do other things that pharma, as you well know, Gina, is sort of starting to explore now. Not just vaccines, but also potentially enzyme replacement for metabolic diseases and all kinds of stuff like that.
Gina: So today, Oct. 4th, was the prize that I think a lot of our listeners were most looking forward to. That was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and that was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov.
Mitch, can you tell us more about that prize?
Mitch: Sure. So the prize was awarded for people who were the pioneers in developing and understanding and synthesizing quantum dots. Quantum dots are nanometer-sized crystals of semiconductors. They’re called quantum dots because these particles readily exhibit some unusual quantum effects. But the ones that quantum dots exhibit are pretty easy to see with your eye.
By carefully controlling the size of the nanocrystals—let’s say having a little vial that has one size, another vial with a slightly larger one, a different vial with a slightly larger one yet—you can produce colors in all the colors of the rainbow and many colors that you don’t even see in the rainbow as well. And all of that is due to the quantum nature of these little crystals.
Gina: And why do we want to be able to do that?
Mitch: Ah, there’s so many neat things about that. First of all, it explains some very, very fundamental things in physics and chemistry. And it gives you a test bed to probe those fundamental things. But the thing about them that’s really attractive is their applications.
Because quantum dots have these unusual optical properties—as I said, they can be prepared to fluoresce in all the colors of the rainbow, and they have many, many other properties too, but the optical ones are the easiest ones to grasp—they have been used in all kinds of applications. The most famous one is in quantum dot televisions. It’s so famous that you can walk into any big-box store anywhere in the world, probably, and find these huge boxes of ultrasharp, ultra-high-resolution TV screens that say “quantum dot” right on the box. So that’s one thing, high-resolution televisions.
They’re also used in other light-emitting devices, like light-emitting diodes, and lasers, and other devices like that. But beyond all that kind of stuff, they’ve also been used—because of their optical properties—in medical diagnostics and things like biomedical imaging, where they’re used to tag certain types of tissues and tag cells.
Gina: So, I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but the Nobel Prizes are announced [at] 5:30, 5:45, very early in the morning, eastern time. And this is something that a lot of our reporters every year will get up early in order to cover or to be, you know, sort of on call for covering should this fall into their particular beat or topic area.
I wonder if you guys have any rituals for getting up this early? Is there a specific Nobel day thing that you like to do? Do you like to have a cup of coffee ready? Is there a way you stay awake?
Laurel: My husband gives me a hard time because I always keep the 4:45 and 5:00 a.m. Monday and Wednesday alarms in my phone, like, year-round. I turn them off. But I have them because it just makes me smile to see them. Generally, I don’t use them.
Gina: But you’re like, “Soon. October.”
Laurel: Yeah, soon. Those two days in October, the two days when I cover breaking news, they’re coming. So that’s my special Nobel thing.
Mitch: That’s great. It’s even earlier for me because I’m in Chicago, which is on central time. So I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. and I have to move. And Gina, you have to set your alarm for 2:00 a.m.
Gina: Well, I will, I will confess this year I did not get up with the prizes because I am, I am now based in California. So I left that to Mitch.
Mitch: Well, I definitely set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. I got up at that time on all 3 days this week—Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday—in case I was able to help with the physiology and medicine prize and then to write the other two prizes [physics and chemistry]. And do I have any techniques? Yeah, my most important technique is I set my phone and I put it under my pillow so that it makes my bed vibrate and make noise.
And definitely coffee. You asked whether or not I had a—how did you call it?—a habit of, like, preparing a cup of coffee? No, I prepare two cups of coffee. Yeah, coffee definitely gets me through the work.
Gina: And a special shout-out to Mitch, who covered the Nobel in chem this morning, so you’ve got to be nearing your 12th hour at work.
Mitch: No, I’m looking for—who knows?—I’m looking forward to going running later this afternoon.
Gina: Wow, I would be immediately in bed taking a nap, so that’s awesome.
Mitch: No, I’ll go running later and then celebrate with a beer. How’s that?
So how do you guys—The prize is announced. We have no idea what it is. What are you thinking in those first few seconds? Are you, you know, are you focused on the science? Are you like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what that is.” Are you already thinking about sources? What are the first few thoughts running through your head?
Laurel: I would say that usually my first thought is, “Am I going to be the one to cover this?” And that’s been something that I’ve thought at previous jobs as well. I used to work for a biochemistry organization, so there were some physiology and some chemistry prizes that were just too far outside of scope for us. And yeah, after that it’s, “Gosh, who could tell me more about that?”
In the couple of minutes before the committee sort of launches into their deeper scientific explanation, I always try and pay attention to that.
Mitch: Well, I guess I don’t prepare myself very much ahead of time because who knows what the topic’s going to be? Who knows who the prizewinners are going to be? And then the chemistry prize. Well, we have a bunch of people on staff who stand by as the prize is being announced, and then we make a last-second decision who’s going to write it based on their subject expertise.
And it just turns out that the prize was awarded for quantum dots. I’m like, “Quantum dots. I’ve been writing about that since, like, 1998 or something.” I’m like, “I could do it if you want, if anybody else wants to take it,” and nope, the messages came in very quick, “You do it. You do it.” Like, “OK, happy to do it.”
So I got lucky in this case. Sometimes I don’t know what the topic’s about.
Gina: Mitch, when did you start at C&EN?
Mitch: Nineteen ninety-seven. I am now unbelievably in my 26th year. I don’t know how that happened.
I’ve had one-on-one conversations with Moungi Bawendi and Lou Brus over the years. I sat with Moungi Bawendi more than 20 years ago in his office at MIT late in the afternoon. And I sat with Lou Brus in his office at Columbia, it must be 15 years ago. But those are people whose names I’ve known for all the years that I’ve been at C&E News.
Gina: So I’m wondering, has there ever been one that, like, totally flabbergasted you and you were like, “I don’t even, this wasn’t even on my radar”?
Laurel: Yeah, I think I’ve been covering the Nobels for 3 or 4 years. And last year, when the prize in physiology or medicine went to Svante Pääbo for ancient DNA, man, oh man, that was something I just knew absolutely nothing about. I mean, you know, I had sequenced DNA, but I didn’t know a whole ton about the pitfalls, and that was what his work was all about.
Man, that was one where I was learning a whole, whole lot under pressure in 2 hours.
Gina: I remember that. Yeah, Mitch, have you ever been caught off guard by one?
Mitch: Well, have I been caught off guard? You just have to kind of be resourceful. These days there’s really good material that comes out from the Nobel Foundation. They send out two press releases, one for general audiences and one with a lot more information. During the press announcement itself, they have something similar. They have two people get up and speak about the prize. So you have an opportunity to very quickly learn a few things, and then you have to do, of course, a bunch of fact-checking. But there’s materials that are available, and, you know, in a reasonable amount of time, you can make sense out of what’s going on.
Gina: How do you guys go about finding sources? Are you going to people that you know? Are you trying to find new people? What’s your strategy? I understand it depends a lot on the topic.
Mitch: Well, I would write a single message asking for input, asking for comments, asking, “Can you tell me, just in a sentence or two, what the prize is being awarded for and what the significance of that is?”
And I might send almost the same message—a verbatim thing—to multiple people. And I might include a little line at the bottom saying, “I’m sending this message to others because I’m on a very tight deadline.” And hopefully somebody will reply to me within, you know, my deadline.
The trick is to find people who are in a comfortable time zone. That is, since we’re in the US, send them to people in Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, or something like that because for them it’s the middle of the day already.
Laurel: Yeah, I would say that I probably do something pretty similar. In physiology or medicine especially, there’s kind of a series of prizes that people tend to win before they win the Nobel Prize. So, for instance, if someone’s gotten the Gairdner Award and the Lasker Award and the Breakthrough Prize, then they’re on kind of a short list of people likely to win the Nobel Prize at some point. So for those folks, I try and think ahead of time about, “Who would I talk to? Who is the best possible source on this?”
But other times, the kinds of insights that you can get from really scattershotting it and kind of seeing the picture as these disparate people reply can be really cool.
Gina: So the decisions for who gets the Nobel, I think is kind of a mysterious process. You know, like, I always imagine some people going into a smoke-filled room and just emerging with the names.
So nobody knows what it’s going to be until it’s announced, but this year was a little bit different in that there was actually a leak of the chemistry prizes. I think it was early this morning. I don’t know if I know the details. I think an email went out to some media. Do you guys—are you briefed on this?
Laurel: Yeah, so a Swedish newspaper broke the news. They had received an email in Swedish, a press release that announced the name of the three laureates, and they reproduced the text of that email, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences vehemently denied that the decision had been finalized. They said it was a mistake. This decision hasn’t been made. There’s no decision taken until it’s been taken. But I think about 4 h later, the announcement was made that those three laureates had won for their work on quantum dots.
And so it does raise a lot of questions about what exactly the process of the academy looks like at this late stage before the prize.
Gina: Yeah, fascinating to me that, that, you know, even in the early hours of this morning, their line was not, you know, “This was not meant to be leaked.” It was that, “We have not decided yet.” And that just makes me so curious about when that decision is actually finalized.
Laurel: I may have gotten a little too interested in this. I would love to know how the leak happened. I think it’s really interesting from, you know, a comms perspective. I think it’s interesting from a crisis-communications perspective. And then, as I said, it’s this sort of insight into that sort of shadowy realm of Nobel committee folks who are so incredibly secretive.
Gina: So, we like to ask, Was there anything from this story that got left out? Is there anything in your coverage of the Nobels this week that you thought was interesting but you couldn’t seem to fit in the story, or just, you know, something that you found out about the prizewinners?
Laurel: One other stray fact that just really delights me is at least two of the laureates this year—Anne L’Huillier in physics and Moungi Bawendi in chemistry—the two of them both had teaching obligations on the mornings where they received notifications that they had won the prize.
L’Huillier, I believe, was in the middle of a lecture when her phone just went off and she completed the lecture. Told her students, “Oh, sorry, guys, I won the Nobel Prize,” and completed her lecture.
And Bawendi, I believe, you know, mentioned during the, the early morning for him, Nobel press conference, that he had to teach at 9:00, and later MIT organized a press conference, and he had been to this 9:00 a.m. physics class and didn’t end up teaching about what he had intended to teach about that day but did go and sit with undergrads and tell them about his career. And I thought that was really cool and not necessarily expected behavior and just really speaks to the character of all of the laureates this year.
Gina: That is so special. I can’t imagine being in either of those rooms.
Mitch: A big piece of the work for which the chemistry prize was awarded was the chemical synthesis of quantum dots, and I definitely did not go into any of that in the story, because in the space of a few hundred words, I don’t think anybody wants to hear about hexanoic acid and these other things that go into making these quantum dots do what they really do.
But they wouldn’t be able to do any of that stuff if the chemistry wasn’t there.
Laurel: I think the, the personal story of Katalin Karikó, especially—and to a lesser extent, Drew Weissman—is a pretty remarkable one.
Every year around the Nobel Prizes, there’s a conversation about the culture of science and what we lionize and why. And I think, Karikó and Weissman are a particularly poignant example of work that was, for a long time, not recognized and not lionized and not supported and yet has turned out to be incredibly important.
You know, if I had had more hours to understand better just how she kept going, I, I would have, have really liked to have delved more deeply into that. Such an inspiring figure.
Gina: If you could change the Nobel process for the better, as someone on the outside of it, how would you like to see it change as you continue to report on it?
Laurel: I would get rid of the three-person limit. Modern science is such a team effort. And in, in life sciences in particular, I mean, it’s like, it’s very unusual that Karikó did these experiments with her own hands. That would generally not be the case. And I think, I don’t know, a couple of years ago I spoke to someone who now works in Hollywood, who had been the first author—or middle author, I can’t recall—on one of the really critical papers in determining the heat-and-capsaicin receptor. And it was work that he had done as an undergraduate, you know, it was just wild.
I think that contributions like that, even if they’re not the decades-long sustained focus that we tend to reward professors for, are real. And, and, you know, often graduate students can have real insights that, that really move things forward. And so I would try to find a way to recognize more of the, the teamness of pretty much any kind of discovery.
Mitch: Well, that’s a great answer, Laurel. I don’t know that I have anything wise to say, but I’ll just say this: I have never been to one of the award ceremonies in Stockholm, but if I receive an invitation and can possibly go, I’ll go. I have a tuxedo, if that helps.
Gina: If anybody is listening from Stockholm.
Laurel: Anybody in Sweden?
Gina: OK, well, thank you, Mitch and Laurel, for coming on today to talk about the Nobel Prizes. Tell our listeners where they can find you on social media.
Mitch: You can usually find me in the Chicago C&EN news office, which is the basement of my home in the Skokie-Evanston area of Illinois. Or you can go on our website and find email addresses and phone numbers to reach me. I’m easily reachable. Google me. I’m the science writer, not the football player who shares my name.
Laurel: You can find me on the C&EN website or on Bluesky @LaurelOldach, O-l-d-a-c-h.
Gina: And you can find me on Twitter, or X, as @GinaCVitale, and [on] other platforms, I should have the same name.
Once again, you can find Mitch and Laurel’s coverage of the Nobel Prizes on C&EN’s website or in the Oct. 9th print issue of C&EN. We’ve put links in the show notes along with the episode credits. And we’d love to know what you think of C&EN Uncovered. You can share your feedback with us by emailing [email protected]. This has been C&EN Uncovered, a series from C&EN’s Stereo Chemistry. Stereo Chemistry is the official podcast of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is an independent news outlet published by the American Chemical Society. Thanks for listening.
The Athel tamarisk (Tamarix aphylla) thrives in the arid, salt-rich soils of coastal flats across the Middle East. That’s because the tamarisk is a halophyte, a type of plant that secretes excess salt in concentrated droplets from glands in its leaves. The moisture from these briny excretions dissipates in the heat of the day, leaving the tamarisk encrusted in white crystals that shake off in the wind.
While driving through the hot, humid deserts of the United Arab Emirates, materials scientist Marieh Al-Handawi of New York University Abu Dhabi noticed water condensing on these crystals. There are lots of plants with leaf structures adapted to attract liquid water from fog. But Al-Handawi, who looks to nature for strategies to tackle water scarcity, suspected that the chemical composition of the excreted salts might have something to do with the dew.
To investigate, Al-Handawi and her team recorded time-lapse videos of Athel tamarisk plants in their natural habitat. These recordings showed that salt crystals that form from daytime excretions swell with water at night. Back in the lab, the researchers found that at 35° Celsius and 80 percent relative humidity, a naturally encrusted branch collected 15 milligrams of water on its leaves after two hours, while a washed branch yielded only about one-tenth as much.
“This result was conclusive to us,” Al-Handawi says, “because it proved salts are the main contributor to the water harvesting, and it’s not the surface of the plant.” What’s more, the researchers observed dew form on the crystals down to just 50 percent relative humidity.
When the scientists scrutinized the mineral makeup of the tamarisk’s saline sprinkles, they found more than 10 different types of salt all crystallized together. These crystals are made mostly of sodium chloride and gypsum. Yet the researchers also spotted traces of a secret ingredient: lithium sulfate. This mineral is exceptionally good at taking in water and at much lower humidity than either sodium chloride or gypsum. While sodium chloride and gypsum bring in the largest volumes of water, the addition of lithium sulfate to the mineral mélange, the researchers say, helps explain how the tamarisk collects water even at low humidity.
“This paper provides a new level of detailed understanding of how some desert plants can both excrete salt and use it to take up water from the air into leaves,” says plant physiologist and ecologist Lawren Sack of UCLA, who was not involved in the study.
He is excited to see the chemical complexity of the salts involved. Desert plants have evolved intricate chemical strategies to squeeze every last drop of water from the environment, he says, and most of those systems await discovery.
Al-Handawi agrees, noting that the salt recipe may differ across regions and seasons. It makes her hopeful, she says, that there are other exciting water-harvesting materials waiting to be found in the desert.
At one stage, small-molecule drugs seemed at risk of going out of fashion, as industry began to favor biotherapeutics. But over the past 10 years, small molecules have made it clear that they aren’t going away. New classes of molecules, such as proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) and molecular glues, have people excited. So do technologies, such as machine learning and generative artificial intelligence, that are helping drive drug discovery. Today, drug hunters have more ambition to go after difficult targets and to use novel chemistry. And that makes it an exciting time for chemists.
Last year, sales of the 10 top-selling drugs were split 40:60 between small molecules and larger, more complicated biologics, according to Drug Discovery and Development. But those numbers are skewed by the huge cost of some biologic blockbusters. On a global scale, around 90% of all drugs sold are small molecules, according to a Medicine in Drug Discovery paper (2021, DOI: 10.1016/j.medidd.2020.100075).
Not too long ago, these small-molecule drugs looked as if they were going out of fashion. Advances in biotechnology enabled pharmaceutical companies to cost-effectively generate a range of biologics, such as large peptides, recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, fusion proteins, and vaccines.
But organic compounds with low molecular weight—molecules that can be administered orally and can pass through cell membranes to reach intracellular targets—have been a mainstay of the pharmaceutical industry for over 100 years. Rather than fade away, they continue to be an important part of the industry’s therapeutic arsenal. In the past 10 years or so, advances in technology, synthetic methodology, and biopharmaceutical research have opened up more opportunities for innovative and creative small-molecule drugs.
Data from the US Food and Drug Administration show that small molecules continue to play a vital role in the pharmacopoeia. Of the 293 new chemical entities that the FDA approved in 2017–22, 182 were small-molecule drugs.
In the mix
Over the past 10 years, small molecules accounted for almost two thirds of new drug approvals by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Source: US Food and Drug Administration.
And drug developers are learning new ways to use small molecules to target disease. The traditional approach to drugging many diseases was to find a molecular key that could fit inside a protein, blocking off part of its 3D shape and inhibiting its activity. Increasingly, researchers are instead using small molecules to covalently bind to proteins or to bring proteins near one another so they can work together.
Rather than losing their attractiveness in the modern world of biological advances, small molecules are having something of a renaissance. There’s a buzz and a feeling that medicinal chemists can design solutions for diseases they once would have considered impossible to confront.
New modes of action
Many chemists would agree that there is a renewed enthusiasm for what medicinal chemists can do, even if they wouldn’t call it a golden age. Keith Hornberger, who leads a team of medicinal chemists at the biotechnology firm Arvinas, says golden age is not the right moniker. “I’d say it’s the new age,” he says. New uses for small molecules are ones that were never considered 20 years ago and have redefined what chemists think of as druggable.
The biggest change, experts say, is the possibilities opened up by covalent inhibitors and induced-proximity molecules, molecules that go beyond the lock-and-key approach to targeting unwanted proteins.
Covalent drugs can grab hold of reactive amino acids on proteins, even when a suitable pocket, or keyhole, does not exist. One high-profile example is the work of Kevan Shokat of the University of California, San Francisco, and his team. In 2013, Shokat’s group found a way for a drug to covalently bind to a cysteine in a cancer-causing mutant of KRas and inhibit the protein. Today, it’s not just cysteines that can be targeted but many other reactive amino acid side chains as well.
And the most well-known examples of induced-proximity targeting are the proteolysis-targeting chimeras, or PROTACs, first developed by Craig Crews’s laboratory at Yale University. These floppy molecules with binders at both ends can draw together two proteins in a cell and add ubiquitin tags to flag the protein of interest for degradation.
Ivacaftor helps keep an ion channel open in people with cystic fibrosis.
Chemists have also since extended the approach to create a host of variants. These include regulated induced proximity targeting chimeras (RIPTACs), which hold on to, stabilize, and inhibit problem proteins, and lysosome-targeting chimeras (LYTACs), which specifically mark extracellular proteins for destruction. These molecules draw together proteins involved in cancer to cause cell death or pull extracellular proteins into the cell for destruction. Chemists can also now create molecules that try different posttranslational modifications, such as deubiquitination, phosphorylation, and acetylation.
These long molecules might not look like the small-molecule drugs of the past, and they don’t have the characteristics that traditionally make a good small-molecule drug. But clinical trials have shown that the molecules can get into cells and effectively treat different cancers.
No PROTACs have yet jumped over the final regulatory hurdles and won approval. But experts say the induced-proximity concept has proved its naysayers wrong and that it’s just a matter of time before such a drug makes it to market.
PROTACs like these from Arvinas contain two binding motifs joined by a linker.
Meanwhile, molecular glues are smaller ways to induce degradation using ubiquitination. They work by glomming on to one protein to change its affinity for another protein in the cell.
Molecular-glue firms are now signing deals with Big Pharma. For example, Proxygen has inked deals with both Merck KGaA and Merck & Co. to develop molecular glues as degraders in the last year. And Monte Rosa Therapeutics’ latest collaboration is with pharma firm Roche to develop glues against cancer and neurological disease targets previously thought undruggable.
Looking back, Hornberger says, these developments came from the careful structural work of chemical biologists like Shokat. This work helped medicinal chemists move away from the lock-and-key paradigm of protein inhibition. Today, many medicinal chemists are looking for different toeholds and ways to alter protein behavior.
If you would have told medicinal chemists 15, 20 years ago that we’d be doing chemistry in cells, we would just laugh at that, but that’s what we’re doing.”
Joel Barrish, partner, RA Capital Ventures
“If you would have told medicinal chemists 15, 20 years ago that we’d be doing chemistry in cells, we would just laugh at that, but that’s what we’re doing,” says Joel Barrish, an industry veteran now at RA Capital Ventures. “I mean, we are basically taking control of the natural regulatory mechanisms.”
And it’s not just proteins that can be targeted. A key area of small-molecule research is the identification and development of molecular entities capable of targeting RNA. For a long time, human RNA was thought to be undruggable, but researchers now know that RNA assumes 3D structures, creating binding sites for small molecules to interact with.
“My personal opinion is that the next big thing is nucleic acids,” says Zoë Waller, an associate professor in drug discovery at University College London. “Targeting nucleic acids was a specialist area, but it is really becoming more mainstream now.”
One company working on RNA binding is Arrakis Therapeutics, cofounded by chemist Jennifer Petter. She says the firm is working on multiple approaches for silencing RNA, including binding a regulatory section to modify biology directly, inducing RNA degradation, and even covalently binding the polynucleotide. “Within our walls, we actually have a multimodality small-molecule shop,” she says.
How small is small?
But not all those molecules are so small.
Twenty-five years ago, Christopher A. Lipinski created a set of rules, or guidelines, to describe the characteristics of successful small molecules that could be taken orally. Dubbed the rule of 5, they were based on observations that successful drug candidates were often smaller than 500 g/mol in mass and lipophilic. But not all the drugs being developed by medicinal chemists fit those criteria, nor have they ever.
Today, medicinal chemists are making larger and larger molecules. Called beyond-rule-of-5 molecules, these can include bifunctional drugs like PROTACs as well as much larger molecules, such as cyclic peptides. “So what is small anymore?” Barrish asks.
The immunosuppressant cyclosporin A was approved in 1983, before Lipinski published his rule of 5.
Matthew Disney is a chemist at at the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation and Technology at the University of Florida who founded Expansion Therapeutics to develop small molecules to bind to RNA structures. He has also noticed the trend toward larger molecules. “FDA-approved drugs are getting larger in size,” Disney says. “Industry putting things out in the literature to sort of show that these bigger molecules can be orally bioavailable—I think it just makes the science better for everybody.”
Developing those larger molecules requires medicinal chemistry. “I don’t think you can make medicine without organic chemists. Both academic and industry,” Disney says. “You need the academics to make new methods and industry to deploy them. You need synthetic people in addition to chemical biologists, bioinformatics, and biologists.”
And the chemists involved need new synthetic methods to add to their tool kits, according to Matthew Todd, who builds open-source medicinal chemistry projects in his academic lab at University College London. One such development is the skeletal editing techniques that can swap atoms in and out of molecular structures. A recent example can swap a carbon out for a nitrogen in an aromatic ring.
These new synthetic tools give medicinal chemists more options and can help them build on molecules that are shown to bind to a target but perhaps not so well. “Combining these with the prevalence of covalent molecules and the prevalence of degraders opens up things that you can do with molecules,” Todd says.
Petter agrees. “If you’re willing to take on the larger molecules, this opens up the possibility for some really remarkable, innovative molecular designs,” she says.
Technological developments
Industry insiders point out that chemists would not be making these strides without advances in biology and instrumentation. “It’s advancements of science, overall,” RA Capital Ventures’ Barrish says. “It’s advancements in chemistry and technologies that really are allowing us to begin to access [targets and biology] that we hadn’t been able to do before.”
Those technological leaps began in the 1980s with improvements in structural biology, including the development of cryo-electron microscopy and high-resolution X-ray crystallography techniques that allow scientists to visualize biology in atomic detail. But they also involve the bioinformatic screens and assays that can test for places where a protein can interact with another protein.
Genetic screening also helped medicinal chemists’ efforts by finding new links between genes and diseases so that drug hunters could identify new drug targets. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Petter says that improvements in genetic sequencing have hugely helped her work developing RNA-targeting molecules.
Another change has been the externalization of services, such as compound library design. The proliferation of contract research organizations and other service firms means that biotechs can buy the chemical expertise they need rather than have to develop it themselves. And those firms can also drive technological innovation—for example, by building DNA-encoded libraries or on-demand compounds.
The services from these molecule-on-demand firms have “really altered things,” Todd says. “We’ve been looking at all the molecules that you can buy, and we’re trying to think of ways of expanding that by synthesizing new core building blocks, which you can then decorate with other things that you can buy.”
These modular building blocks, and the ways they have been described computationally, also primed researchers to experiment with how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help design new drugs. Historically, computational methods helped drug hunters and builders model new small-molecule therapeutics without actually having to synthesize them. That trend has continued with AI-driven start-ups, which are either solely or partially focused on small-molecule drug discovery.
According to a report by BiopharmaTrend, about 45% of all drug discovery start-ups that use or develop specialized AI tools are focused on small molecules, while only about 24% are working to develop biologic drugs. The figures are similar for the cash being invested in these firms by venture capitalists.
No one expects computers to replace medicinal chemists, but many scientists think AI can help them. Several drug discovery companies with AI-powered platforms have recently progressed molecules to the clinic, sometimes faster and cheaper than might be expected with other techniques.
“That’s where the golden opportunity arises: that we can have a renaissance with better small molecules with AI coming in,” UCL professor Waller says.
But is it a golden age?
Today, small molecules can do many of the same things that biologic drugs can do and find financial success doing so. For example, among the drugs that treat spinal muscular atrophy are Zolgensma, a onetime gene therapy injection; Spinraza, an antisense oligonucleotide given as an injection into the spine every few months; and, since 2020, a daily small-molecule treatment Evrysdi (risdiplam) given as an oral solution. Evrysdi racked up over $1 billion in sales in 2022, and its sales in the first half of this year grew by 48% from the same period in 2022, while sales of Zolgensma and Spinraza fell.
Small molecules are often effective and cheap, especially once they come off patent. And they can be easier than biologics to store and take as a patient. As researchers understand more about how diseases and drugs work at a molecular level, older molecules whose mechanisms were perhaps not understood when they were first developed can become useful once more.
The pharmaceutical industry is over 100 years old, and for many, the true golden age of drug discovery ran from the 1940s to the 1970s. Small-molecule drugs from this era, such as antidepressants, antipsychotics, and oral contraceptives, were truly revolutionary. Instead of calling today the golden age, chemists are using different terms: a new golden age, a new age, a renaissance, or a renewal.
Biotech entrepreneur Ethan Perlstein, who is trying to repurpose existing small molecules to treat metabolic disorders, contends that the golden age never ended—people just got distracted by other therapeutic modalities. There is an element of fashion to research, and “small molecules is a terrible term for marketing,” he says.
I envision there will be types of drugs that will look weird to us because they don’t look like what we’re expecting.”
Zoë Waller, associate professor in drug discovery, University College London
As drug hunters gaze into their crystal balls, small molecules are still a key part of the medicinal arsenal. But perhaps more and more, what those molecules look like will change. “I envision there will be types of drugs that will look weird to us because they don’t look like what we’re expecting,” Waller says. “And that’s what we need. . . . There’s so much potential there.”
CORRECTION:
This article was updated on Oct. 31, 2023, to correct Matthew Disney’s affiliation. He is based at the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation and Technology at the University of Florida, not Scripps Research.
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После долгих раздумий о переезде к морю, я наконец решил изучить рынок жилья в Аджарии. Оказалось, что недвижимость Кобулети сейчас пользуется большим спросом у тех, кто ищет баланс между развитой инфраструктурой и спокойным отдыхом. Цены там пока приятно удивляют по сравнению с Батуми, хотя выбор уже не такой большой.
