Pharmaceutical industry chemists’ skills

Process chemists thus play a crucial role in advancing both basic and applied chemistry. Given that man-made chemical products would not exist without their skills, it is odd and unfortunate that they rarely have much say in selecting the molecular targets for which they must devise practical commercial syntheses. Nowhere is the exclusion of process chemists from the discovery process more unfortunate than in the pharmaceutical industry. Here discovery takes the form of a sky s-the-limit search, wherein chemistry that is feasible, let alone ideal, for application on a practical scale is all but ignored. The pharmaceutical industry therefore needs more process chemists than any other field, and the challenges they face are by far the most daunting of chemists in any area of pure or applied chemistry. 

Computational chemists combine their expertise in mathematics, their computer skills, and their love of chemistry. Computational chemistry has been used in industry to aid in the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs and new catalysts. Computational chemists are employed in all areas of chemistry and work closely with experimental chemists. 

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