Drug Development Through the Looking Glass

By Angelo De Palma, Ph.D., Contributing Editor To keep up with new opportunities for chiral materials, BASF has doubled its chiral business development team. This group anticipates the market’s needs for chiral synthons and intermediates by scouring public and private databases for chiral pipeline compounds. When something promising shows up, the team proposes possible chiral synthons and intermediates to serve the needs of development, scale-up, and manufacturing. “We talk with chemists and in some cases provide very small quantities of new building blocks,” says Stein. With its 2001 acquisition of U.K.-based Chirotech, Dowpharma (Midland, Mich.) has redoubled its efforts at providing a complete chiral tool kit to pharmaceutical customers. “Chirality is very dear to our hearts,” says Mark Cassidy, Ph.D., business director for small molecules. “There’s not a single therapeutic class today that is not affected by it.” Dowpharma’s specialties are asymmetric hydrogenation, chiral hydroformylation and biocatalysis, for which the company utilizes both proprietary and commercially-available catalysts and enzymes. With the diversity of NCEs, drug sponsors can no longer rely on a single transformation or capability. “Customers don’t want that one-size-fits-all approach,” says Cassidy. “We operate in a custom market and the business models we practice also must be customized to meet to our customers’ needs.” Dow supplies early-stage chiral synthons and registered starting materials through Asian manufacturing partners. More advanced, regulated chiral intermediates are manufactured in Europe or at Dowpharma’s main facility in Midland. Proprietary chiral intermediates, catalysts and biotransformations may also be supplied or licensed to customers or their designated contractors. Chiral reagents and simple intermediates are increasingly sourced overseas. James Gao, Ph.D., sales manager at D-L Chiral Chemicals (Monmouth Junction, N.J.) represents custom- and bulk-synthesis companies in his native China. “We learned very well from Wal-Mart,” says Gao. “We buy cheaply from Asia and sell here at a