Про Енамин и не только в C&EN

korendovych · 29.12.2007 01:17:18

Недавно вышла статья

Shopping The World

Faced with low-cost competition from Indian and Chinese newcomers, established contract research firms elsewhere reach for the scientific high ground

NOVEMBER 26, 2007 VOLUME 85, NUMBER 48 PP. 13-24

Привожу часть (порядка 40%), где пишется о бСССР, если вдруг к статье нет доступа

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But Chemizon is not the only contract chemistry company ably competing against Chinese and Indian rivals. Farther east, Russian and Ukrainian CROs are also tackling the challenge.
Indeed, when chemistry executives in these former Soviet states are asked whether they've had to downsize in response to Chinese and Indian competition, most of their answers echo that of Nikolay Savchuk, CEO of ChemDiv, which employs 500 researchers and other personnel in Moscow and San Diego, Calif.
"Cut back? We've actually had to expand," Savchuk says.
To stay competitive, Russian and Ukrainian CROs have extended the breadth of chemistry services they offer to include more steps along the drug discovery pipeline-everything from custom synthesis to biological screening. These services range far beyond making diverse chemical libraries and providing synthetic organic chemistry know-how, skills on which many of the CROs were initially based.
MOST OF THE MAJOR CROs in Russia and Ukraine emerged as the Soviet bloc dissolved in the early 1990s. After the breakup, scientific funding plunged, and "many highly experienced and highly educated chemists essentially found themselves out of work or on limited welfarelike support," explains Eugene Vaisberg, CEO and lead founder of ChemBridge, which is headquartered in San Diego but has the bulk of its operations in Moscow.
Funding for academic research in Russia and Ukraine remains limited, Vaisberg says, leaving a pool of highly trained chemists in search of more lucrative employment. ChemBridge employs 300 people, 150 of whom are chemists; 90% of them have Ph.D.s or master's degrees, he adds.
The Soviet collapse coincided with big pharma's embrace of high-throughput screening of generic chemical libraries. "They believed high-throughput screening would be the solution for all their problems, and all they had to do is find as many compounds as possible and to screen them all," says Vasily Pinchuk, vice president of marketing for Kiev-based Life Chemicals, which employs a staff of more than 100, 50 of whom are chemists.
Brokers rushed into the newly opening former Soviet states to purchase and resell in-house chemical libraries that contained unusual nuggets long locked up behind the iron curtain. Entrepreneurial academics took note, went into business, and cut out the middleman.
Many of these academics established businesses on their home turf. Others moved to the U.S. to get things going there before opening facilities back home. Now, CROs in the former Soviet Union operate primarily in Moscow and Kiev, although there's a sprinkling in other cities, such as Irix Pharmaceuticals' joint venture in St. Petersburg.
When the companies began, "people were buying everything we had on the shelf. Unfortunately, these times are over now," Pinchuk says.
"That was the golden age," adds Aleksandr N. Kostyuk, marketing director for Kiev-based Enamine, which employs a research staff of 300, 61 of whom have chemistry Ph.D.s. "Since then, demand for just any screening compounds has dropped considerably."
With the new century came pharma's reality check about high-throughput screening of unfocused chemistry libraries. A shift in demand toward more targeted and complex libraries forced the CROs to reevaluate the business model of selling stock libraries. The ascent of China and India added to the pressure.
TO STAY ABREAST of this competition, Ukrainian and Russian CROs began offering services that required more sophisticated synthetic and medicinal chemistry know-how. "Russia will not be able to beat China or India by number of scientists," says ChemBridge's Vaisberg. The better strategy, he says, is to try besting them with more chemically complex outsourcing services.

More than 100 companies worldwide can provide simple scaffolds, molecular building blocks, or custom resynthesis services, Vaisberg points out. "An average chemist can do this work, but novel custom library design and synthesis capability takes many years of expertise to develop," he notes.
Many CROs in the former Soviet bloc are already providing services that include preparing custom libraries, advancing screening hits into families of leads, and designing libraries that target important biomolecules, such as kinases and ion channels. Many also offer, or are planning to offer, in vitro biological screening of the chemical libraries they build.
To provide clients more services along the drug-discovery pipeline, ChemDiv has taken an additional step by setting up rodent and primate facilities for central nervous system and oncology drug toxicology testing. "We haven't done all the steps to make a drug for a partner yet because we haven't had all the parts in place," Savchuk says. But that's a goal. "So we are now investing in formulation and safety.
"I would say that in three years we could take many of the lead programs we are now working on with customers toward registration," Savchuk says. "In the midterm outlook, we'd like to do Phase II clinical testing."
ChemBridge takes a different perspective. The company has expanded as far as in vitro cell screening but has decided to stay close to its core chemistry competencies. "We want to focus on what we are best at and collaborate with people who are best at other pieces of the puzzle of drug discovery," Vaisberg says.
Some Indian and Chinese companies such as WuXi PharmaTech are now offering a similar spread of medicinal chemistry services, but most of them are younger than the Russian firms. Vaisberg points out that in 2001, months after WuXi was founded, ChemBridge was already working on or negotiating large contracts on advanced custom libraries with the likes of Pfizer and Merck & Co. "The most important differentiating factor between Russia and emerging Indian and Chinese companies is experience," Vaisberg says.
Furthermore, being based in the U.S. helps differentiate ChemBridge from Chinese and Indian competitors, Vaisberg says, because it permits efficient "U.S.-style" project management to be combined with the cost advantage of outsourcing. "Offshore chemistry is much more than chemists with rotovaps," he says. "It's project management, it's secured channels of communication, it's trust."
ANOTHER ADVANTAGE, Vaisberg points out, is that being in Russia or Ukraine allows overlap in the workday with European clients. There's also a cultural closeness, he notes. "Moscow and Kiev are in fact a part of Europe."
Russian and Ukrainian CROs report that European companies account for about 25-40% of clients. U.S. companies account for around 50-60% of clients, while Asian firms, primarily Japanese companies, make up about 10-15% of clients. Biotech companies make up the majority of clients, but big pharma provides a greater volume of business.
For clients such as Pfizer, which has been working with groups in Russia for at least six years, calm, steady growth distinguishes the CROs in that area. "Because the growth in Russia and the Ukraine appears reasonable and measured, there does not appear to be a big staff turnover issue that one sees in some companies in India and China," Pfizer's Connell says. "Stability of key staff can be a significant success factor in a multiyear collaboration.
"On the other hand," Connell says, "the growth in India and China has led to an increase of suppliers that support the chemistry outsourcing market. Suppliers of specialty chemicals, biologics, and simple lab supplies and equipment appear to be rushing more resources into Asia to support growth in chemistry sourcing. This in turn creates an infrastructure and operating environment that enables a more efficient global supply chain between our organization and collaborators in India and China."

To keep the supply-chain machinery running smoothly across the sometimes sticky Russian border, and to ensure a ready source of lab supplies to the region, many companies employ custom brokers and international freight-forwarders to expedite the traffic of goods. "We invest heavily in in-house stock of commercial reagents," Vaisberg says. "We also supported creation of joint-venture companies with major catalog providers that hold stock in Moscow."
Enamine, a Ukrainian company, keeps an ample stock of building-block molecules at hand by making its own compounds. "It gives us revenue, but also our chemists have access to a huge pool of starting materials. For us, it's a big advantage," Kostyuk says. The company is currently expanding its building-block business.
On the other hand, some companies say they have responded to Chinese and Indian competition by reducing their business of making basic building blocks, scaffolds, or intermediates.
"We used to produce a lot of custom intermediates and scaffolds," Vaisberg says. "We realized that [those products] had become more commoditized, purely price driven. So we are downscaling intermediate production efforts in favor of more sophisticated custom library-related work or medicinal chemistry." When major pharma clients ask him to do more basic synthetic work, Vaisberg says he tells them, "You get a better deal going somewhere in India or China. Take advantage of our unique pockets of expertise and technology."
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Відредаговано korendovych (29.12.2007 01:17:44)

quinolin · 09.01.2008 02:10:44

В продолжении темы Енамина...
в Енамине там дофига самородков-джедаев как-то надыбал статью про матрешек smile
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja067402c

Abstract:
A hexameric resorcinarene nanocapsule in wet CDCl3 forms inclusion complexes of calix[4]arene with tetramethylammonium and trimethylsulfoxonium cations to give highly stable Russian-doll-type multicomponent assemblies. The 2D NOESY experiments revealed the size of the assembly, the close proximity of the encapsulated calix[4]arene molecule to the resorcinarene molecules of the capsule, and the inclusion of the tetramethylammonium cation in the calix[4]arene cavity.

Відредаговано quinolin (09.01.2008 02:15:24)

007 · 10.01.2008 00:47:11

quinolin написав раніше:

В продолжении темы Енамина...
в Енамине там дофига самородков-джедаев как-то надыбал статью про матрешек

ну не зовсім у Єнаміні wink
був років два тому на захисті в Шиванюка, там це вже було, хоча в Єнамін він пішов десь рік тому, а до того працював в Голандії-Німеччині-Скандинавії, так що робота виконана навіть не в Україні...

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#1 29.12.2007 01:17:18

Про Енамин и не только в C&EN

#2 09.01.2008 02:10:44

Re: Про Енамин и не только в C&EN

#3 10.01.2008 00:47:11

Re: Про Енамин и не только в C&EN

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