{"id":236162,"date":"2026-04-29T18:27:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T23:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/a-drug-discovery-bottleneck-how-cheaper-reagents-could-speed-branched-molecule-synthesis"},"modified":"2026-04-29T18:27:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T23:27:20","slug":"a-drug-discovery-bottleneck-how-cheaper-reagents-could-speed-branched-molecule-synthesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/a-drug-discovery-bottleneck-how-cheaper-reagents-could-speed-branched-molecule-synthesis","title":{"rendered":"A drug discovery bottleneck? How cheaper reagents could speed branched molecule synthesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-drug-discovery-bottleneck-how-cheaper-reagents-could-speed-branched-molecule-synthesis2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When chemists design drug candidates, shape matters enormously. Many active pharmaceutical ingredients contain branched carbon structures\u2014points where the molecular chain forks in a specific direction\u2014that are critical to whether a molecule will bind to its biological target and whether it will be safe. The challenge is that the branched building blocks used to create these structures are not very abundant or commercially available. Now, scientists at Scripps Research have devised a new approach to building these branched molecular structures found in many medicines and materials: one that could make the early stages of drug discovery faster and more efficient.<\/p>\n<p>The method, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.aeb2389\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Science<\/i>, overcomes a stubborn technical obstacle that has limited chemists\u2019 ability to assemble complex molecules from simple, inexpensive starting materials.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis work solves a selectivity problem that challenged us for years,\u201d says Ryan Shenvi, professor at Scripps Research and senior author of the study. \u201cWe\u2019ve now laid the groundwork to access <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2022-05-powerful-strategy-new-to-nature-enzymes.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">iteratively branching materials<\/a> that occur in metabolites, fragrances and drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When chemists design drug candidates, shape matters enormously. Many active pharmaceutical ingredients contain branched carbon structures\u2014points where the molecular chain forks in a specific direction\u2014that are critical to whether a molecule will bind to its biological target and whether it will be safe. The challenge is that the branched building blocks used to create these [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}