A MARKET GROWS, BLOCK BY BLOCK

WHEN DEREK LOWE, author of the In the Pipeline drug discovery blog, wrote a post about laboratory chemical suppliers last year, complaints from commiserating chemists soon flooded his comments section. Buying building-block chemicals for drug discovery, it seems, has become a little like shopping on eBay: Both bargains and pitfalls abound. There was a time when medicinal chemists seeking to create a family of unique compounds would buy starting materials from one of a handful of U.S. catalog houses and create a suitable building block themselves. Today, dozens of synthesis labs across the globe vie to provide building blocks, and some U.S. firms have pulled back from the business. Although chemists are happy with the convenience of off-the-shelf building blocks, they find themselves uneasy with the Wild West atmosphere of the global marketplace. U.S. companies, meanwhile, persist by offering quality, speed, and unique compounds that no one else has. Pharmaceutical starting materials have been around ...