Med-Chemist : "Quintessential Medicinal Chemistry"
“It would be premature to make a recommendation that women drink coffee to lower their endometrial cancer risk,” study author Dr. Edward Giovannucci, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health...
In continuation of my update on taxol....
Baran's group reports erecting that Rockefeller tree and adding the first few ornaments -- a molecule called taxadiene. A conventional taxadiene synthesis is inefficient and involves 26 steps to produce. The Baran group's method involves just 10 steps to produce many times what has been previously synthesized -- more than sufficient for planned research to find a way to efficiently produce Taxol®.
Innovation Leads to Access.....
The taxadiene synthesis is more than just a midway stop on the way to Taxol®. The current commercial Taxol® production method, which involves culturing cells from the yew tree, is more economical than any new synthesis is likely to be. Instead, Baran and his team are aiming to understand the processes used in nature to produce the compound, which are many times more efficient than those used by scientists to date. "It's my opinion that when there's a huge discrepancy between the efficiency of nature and humans, in the space between, there's innovation.
More specifically, lead researcher Phil Baran believes that, while developing an efficient synthesis for Taxol®, they will gain a fundamentally improved understanding of the chemistry involved and develop more widely applicable techniques. Such innovation could allow production of a whole range of taxanes currently inaccessible for drug discovery research either because the quantities researchers can produce are vanishingly small, or because they can't produce them at all. Control of the taxane oxidation process therefore offers the potential for discovering new and important drugs, perhaps even one or more that is better at fighting specific cancers than Taxol®.
Establishing the remaining steps between taxadiene and Taxol® or other more complex taxanes remains a challenging task that Baran estimates will take years.
"Nature has a choreography in the way she decorates the tree," he said. "It's a precise dance she has worked out over millennia. We have to figure out a way to bring that efficiency to the laboratory setting."
Lead researcher Power said. "Myelin is insulation around nerves. MS is characterized by inflamed brain cells that have lost this protective insulation, which ultimately leads to neurodegeneration.......
