Refinery
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Purpose-made compounds and suppliers?
When reading various articles and patents, they are filled with compounds impossible to pronounce and many of them are only vaguely referred in some
chemical databases. I was wondering does pharmaceutical companies manufacture a lot of these special compounds themselves or are they purpose made by
different suppliers specialized in by-order batches?
It would be next to impossible to manufacture everything by own facilities, because chemistry is like a pyramid: in order to make one compound, you
need a few for it, and for them, again a few, and just in few steps there is at least a hundred synthesis behind a single route.
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Ubya
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it depends, usually if a lab has a lot of money, and values its time, it will just ask another lab to make the precursor, otherwise they will be doing
everything by themselves, starting from the first commercially available precursor
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Dr.Bob
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There is a big difference between most scientific articles and patents. To publish a scientific paper, you usually have to have made, confirmed and
published analytical data on all of the compounds listed. But patents often claims many structures, often thousands, millions or even billions or
more compounds, but they usually only show that a small number can be made, anywhere from a few to a few hundred. The theory is that if you show a
varied number of techniques that work for a set of compounds, that they will be general enough to work for all possible compounds claimed. (They are
not always so).
So while making even a hundred compounds in a patent is not trivial, quick or easy, it can (and usually is) done by a team of chemists who buy, make
and borrow the chemicals needed and then do a lot of work. Many patents represent many person-years of work, often millions of dollars in big pharma,
so getting the chemicals needed if only a small bit of the work. Nowadays many of the materials are outsourced to India and China, before that they
were often done in small companies in the US and Europe. Some of those companies sell 10,000's of compounds, most will make custom analogs as well.
But the great part of chemistry is that with even a few hundred varied compounds, you can make many millions of final products, often in only 3-10
steps. With modern automation and technology, it could even be done quicker in theory, or at least you can spend a lot more money that way.
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