In what they have called an ‘unprecedented achievement,’ researchers have managed to synthesize a powerful anticancer compound. Scientists have been trying to achieve this feat for more than 3 decades.
Yoshito Kishi, who is the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, is the lead researcher of this scientific endeavor, and the compound in question is called “halichondrin.”
Halichondrin occurs naturally in the sea sponge Halichondria okadai. A team of Japanese-based researchers discovered it in its natural state 33 years ago.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.