Typically, it has taken pharmaceutical companies four or five years to go from gene target to small molecule.
Therefore, development costs will be higher and there will be far fewer biosimilars developed than generic versions of small molecule drugs.
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Evident also was the small molecule it picks up from the body's cells to shift itself from one state to another.
Second, large drug companies are trying to avoid traditional small molecule drugs that will face large generic uptake after their patents expire.
We take a protein, and a small molecule, and the small molecule binds with the protein and changes the activity of the protein.
And, small molecule pharmaceutical developer Myrexis ( MYRX) said its board has appointed interim CEO and CFO Robert Lollini to take the CEO post permanently.
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.
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.
"The next step is to be able to industrialize this process of finding a small molecule inhibitor, as Millennium seems to have done, " says Banc of American Securities analyst James Reddoch.
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).
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.
The IBM team's innovation to create the first single molecule picture, of a molecule called pentacene, was to use the tip to pick up a single, small molecule made up of a carbon and an oxygen atom.
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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.
Kodak's small-molecule OLEDs, which make better use of current manufacturing technology, proved quicker to develop.
Protein drugs like Enbrel are much more expensive to make than traditional small-molecule drugs, and Thousand Oaks, Calif.
That's why small-molecule generics are so much cheaper in America than they are in Canada and western Europe.
And they might be more lucrative than generic versions of small-molecule drugs, if the complexity of developing these larger molecules limits competition.
It is in the process of completing the acquisition of Allos Therapeutics (ALTH), whose drug, Folotyn, is a small-molecule therapeutic for cancer.
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Similar expirations have spawned a large generic industry around so-called small-molecule drugs and the same can occur for genetically engineered products that are proprietary and highly profitable today, Konski said.
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Because most small-molecule drugs can be manufactured with easily replicable chemical processes that lead to a largely reproducible drug formulation, the clinical trial data that supported approval of the original version can be relied upon for the generic versions.
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.
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.
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.
He then developed an initiator molecule for each stretch that would make thousands of copies of that stretch if exposed to a small sample of it.
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