Chemists pull back the curtain, offering a rare peek into drug development at big pharma

For a few hours on Wednesday, the most exciting thing in drug development wasn’t the patients or potential payoffs. Instead, it was all about the chemists.

Scientists from Merck, Eli Lilly, Amgen, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline were providing a detailed look at their preclinical development programs at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in Boston, disclosing information about what their drug candidates look like and how the structures are built, chemically speaking.

It was a day in the sun for the medicinal chemists who toil in the early stages of drug development — one that glorified the single PowerPoint slide filled with a mess of hexagons and lines and numbers, the commercial and clinical meaning of which won’t be clear for years.

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