Now the company is focusing on testing whether can improve side effects and usefulness in small molecule drugs, including ones for several old chemotherapy medicines.
But they have now discovered that by adding thiazovivin, a small molecule involved in cell survival, they doubled that to get 200 times the number of transformed cells.
The Genzyme acquisition is really a bet that in the future drug companies will need stable businesses like vaccines and consumer health that are insulated from the sudden drops of sales that happen with traditional small molecule drugs in the U.S. market.
It's not well-known or even thought about but ever since Leo Hendricks unveiled the first fully synthetic moldable hard plastic called Bakelite to the American Chemical Society in 1909, except for a very small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic ever manufactured still exists somewhere in our environment.
That's why small-molecule generics are so much cheaper in America than they are in Canada and western Europe.
It seems to be particularly important for the growth and survival of some cancer cells and large amounts of the molecule are often present in the cells of non-small cell lung cancers, sometimes in a mutated, over-active form.
Among their projects: developing a hybrid anticancer compound that combines an antibody with a cancer-targeting small molecule and using algae to quickly grow human antibodies that zero in on herpes.
On the FDA's Fast Track and in phase III testing is the company's BAY 43-9006, a small molecule RAF kinase and VEGF inhibitor that inhibits tumor growth for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (advanced kidney cancer).
If Turin wanted to work on this using his algorithm, he'd start with one of patchouli's components--say, a molecule that smells earthy or woody--and try varying its structure in small ways.
The big bottleneck in going from gene to drug is having the chemical know-how to create a small molecule drug, the kind of chemical that can be produced very cheaply and sold for a lot of money.
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