Despite tremendous challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry, it continues with its commitment to innovation and the discovery of novel drugs to address unmet medical needs. Indeed, medicinal chemists face a challenge of their own. Trying to survive in a changing environment where pharma is focusing on biologics drug candidates will require chemists to adapt.

CHEManager International asked R&D experts of chemical and pharmaceutical companies to elaborate on their research strategy and share their opinion with our readers. In detail, we interviewed professionals ranging from CEOs to heads of R&D and process development about:

Challenges and changes affecting the work of R&D chemists in the future.

Dr. Michael Quirmbach: Ž Both the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are rapidly changing in that they both have a need to adapt in order to stay ahead of requirements and competition. I believe it is widely accepted that the traditional way of running and optimizing reactions as a chemist — e.g., simple round-bottom flasks with subsequent TLC, later HPLC, analysis — is not the future for any R&D chemist in a chemical or pharmaceutical research lab. Instead we now discuss the “lab of the future” — but what exactly does it mean? Besides the use of sophisticated automation including online monitoring of reactions using probes, which will all become standard for any R&D lab, it means managing big data.

“Dissemination of data-rich
tools across academia and
industry will be the ultimate
education of future R&D chemists.”

Dr. Michael Quirmbach,
Vice President,
Global Sales & Marketing,
Corden-Pharma International

Integration of all of the available data remains the biggest challenge across the industry and academia. The lab of the future is generally seen as the way to secure sustainability by learning to navigate a large volume of data. The dissemination of data-rich tools across academia and industry will be the ultimate education of future R&D chemists. New skills will be necessary to manage this data-rich environment, which will in turn require intelligent collaboration across departments starting at the university level. The benefits are obvious, i.e., the acceleration of drug development in the scale-up phase for a supply of clinical phase material. Carefully controlled reactions using analytical probes will provide detailed process understanding — important information for faster and more efficient scale-up. Additional topics such as C-H functionalization, that have been historically considered the holy grail of chemistry via functional group conversion, might be solved in the future by a more sophisticated approach. Key elements are the use of experimental design, the parameterization of organic chemistry and the development of sophisticated models that can relate back to a certain reaction mechanism, which may then be used for prediction of effects such as site selectivity.