Pharmaceutical industry findings

The NF and reagent grades are employed in the pharmaceutical industry which makes use of benzyl alcohol s local anesthetic, antiseptic, and solvent properties (17—20). It also finds use in cough symps and drops ophthalmic solutions bum, dental (21), and insect repeUant solutions and ointments and dermatological aerosol sprays. It is used in nail lacquers and as a color developer in hair dyes by the cosmetics industry (22), and in acne treatment preparations (23). 

Traditionally, organic compounds have been synthesized one at a time. This works well for prepar- ing large amounts of a few substances, but it 1 doesn t work so well for preparing small amounts of 1 a great many substances. This latter goal is particu- larlv important in the pharmaceutical industry, w here vast numbers of structurally similar com-< pounds must be screened to find the optimum drug J candidate. 

The search for inhibitors of this pathway began with the first key regulatory enzyme, HMG CoA reductase. Several clinically useful inhibitors of HMG CoA reductase are now known. One of the most successful, Mevacor, produced by Merck, is one of the pharmaceutical industry s best selling products. However, the problem with inhibiting a branched biosynthetic pathway at an early point is that the biosynthesis of other crucial biomolecules may also be inhibited. Indeed, there is some evidence that levels of ubiquinone and the dolichols are affected by some HMG CoA reductase inhibitors. Consequently, efforts have recently been directed towards finding inhibitors of squalene synthase, the enzyme controlling the first step on the route to cholesterol after the FPP branch point. 

Direct instrument control (or the lack of it) was an important issue for the earlier version of CDS. The scheme of connecting the detector channels through A/Ds to CDS worked well in analytical laboratories across the pharmaceutical industry. The scheme provided enough flexibility so that the CDS could collect data from a variety of instruments, including GC, HPLC, IC, SFC, and CE. It was equally important that the CDS could be connected to instruments that were manufactured by different vendors. It was not uncommon to find a variety of instruments from different vendors in a global pharmaceutical research company. The disadvantage of this scheme was that the instrument metadata could not be linked to the result file of each sample analyzed. It could not be guaranteed that the proper instrument parameters were used in sample analysis. Another need came from the increased use of... 

The new major challenge that the pharmaceutical industry is facing in the discovery and development of new drugs is to reduce costs and time needed from discovery to market, while at the same time raising standards of quality. If the pharmaceutical industry cannot find a solution to reduce both costs and time, then its whole business model will be jeopardized The market will hardly be able, even in the near future, to afford excessively expensive drugs, regardless of their quality. 

Combinatorial Chemistry is a set of HTS methods applied in the pharmaceutical industry, mainly aiming at lead-finding in terms of "yes/no" answers. The number of experiments is typically of the order of a million per annum. 

This joke, used to great effect in the opening lines of the film "Annie Hall," is emblematic of the pharmaceutical industry in the early and mid-1990s. The answer, it seemed a decade ago, to weak pipelines and waning efficiency (R D investment vs. sales) was to make more, because new medicines were just waiting to be "discovered." Thus, the faster a company could synthesize and screen new candidate molecules, the faster that company would find them (and keep competitors from finding them first). 

Theoretical calculations can also provide physicochemical data, which can be used as an input for 3D-QSAR correlation studies [134,141]. There is a current trend in the area of lead-finding in the pharmaceutical industry to use calculations to set up computer search profiles to be used in the screening of large structural databases, such as the chemical suppliers databases and the internal company databases. 

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