Expanding roles for academic entrepreneurship in drug discovery.

An assessment of inventors of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medicines reveals a growing role for academic entrepreneurship in general and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported investigators in particular. For all small-molecule therapeutics approved between 2001 and 2019 (383 in total), 8.3% listed an academic inventor in the Orange Book. Remarkably, an additional 23.8% listed an inventor from a company founded by an NIH-funded academic inventor. Over time, the relative inventive contributions from academia has progressively increased, including nearly one-third of medicines approved since 2017. These findings suggest a surging role for academic inventors and founders, perhaps in combination with a faltering of traditional private sector dominance of drug discovery.

Rising Academic Contributions to Drug Development: Evidence of Vigor or Trauma?

We analyzed therapeutic areas most commonly targeted by academia since 2001, finding a domination of certain oncology and infectious diseases. These findings raise important questions about whether this trend reflects an expanded opportunity arising from academic research or a troubling sign of an industry struggling with the challenges of innovation.

Improved calibration of area detectors using multiple placements.

Calibration of area detectors from powder diffraction standards is widely used at synchrotron beamlines. From a single diffraction image, it is not possible to determine both the sample-to-detector distance and the wavelength, but, with images taken from multiple positions along the beam direction and where the relative displacement is known, the sample-to-detector distance and wavelength can both be determined with good precision. An example calibration using the GSAS-II software package is presented.

Construction of the first cross-linked double helical polyiodide.

A homobimetallic supramolecular helicate has been used to template the formation of a polyiodide network which adopts an infinite cross-linked double helical structure, topologically analogous to DNA.

Helical templating of polyiodide networks at a binuclear metallo complex.

A homobimetallic supramolecular helicate has been prepared from a new multimodal ligand, and used to template the formation of two polyiodide networks, one containing an unprecedented figure-of-eight polyiodide helix, the other dominated by peripheral C-H...I polyiodide chain interactions.