BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Pfizer’s chemistry machine

How Pfizer is bringing continuous flow to medicinal chemistry

February 16, 2018 1:09 AM UTC

With the goal of creating a step-change in the optimization of small molecules in discovery research, Pfizer Inc. has built a continuous flow machine that rapidly tests thousands of chemical reactions using submilligram quantities of starting material. The goal is to bring the optimization process upstream in drug development and reduce the amount of reinventing the wheel on compound synthesis that occurs later in CMC.

Although combinatorial chemistry has become commonplace throughout the industry and enabled construction of large compound libraries, the standard methods still limit the options available to medicinal chemists for optimizing molecules early in drug discovery...