Organic Chemistry—Bristol Myers Squibb Symposium

This talk will focus on concepts in chemistry as applied to the discovery of new drugs for the treatment of serious diseases. We will discuss vignettes from several drug discovery programs with a focus on the principles of retrosynthesis, conformation of small molecules, and physical organic chemistry and their impact on the discovery of new treatments for serious diseases. We often consider about the importance of synthetic efficiency in process development and commercialization of new drugs, but efficient discovery of new potent xenobiotics also relies on sharp retrosynthetic skills. Similarly, physical organic concepts such as conformational preference (a-values), kinetic isotope effects, and entropy of binding play important roles in deriving potency, selectivity and pharmacokinetics of drug discovery.

Note: This is the first of two talks in the symposium. Seth Herzon from Yale University will give the second talk at 4:00 p.m.