The story behind HIV drug Fostemsavir (BMS-663068)

Post date: Sep 7, 2017 5:53:38 AM

Image source: Ming Yan and Phil S. Baran http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.oprd.7b00208?src=recsys

Fostemasavir (BMS-663068) is an experimental HIV entry inhibitor being developed by the pharmaceutical company BMS (see Wikipedia for intro). How do you synthesize enough of this compound for clinical trials? Answer: Process chemists. These chemists are experts at doing chemistry on large scale (industrial plant scale!). There is a nine part series they recently published in the journal Organic Process Research and Development that provides some insight into the challenges that process chemists must find solutions to in their line of research from building the molecule piece by piece to ultimately how to formulate it. http://pubs.acs.org/toc/oprdfk/21/8

Ming Yan and Phil Baran also wrote an intro to the series of articles showing the tremendous amount of work that went into developing this new drug: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.oprd.7b00208

Fostemasavir (BMS-663068)

On a somewhat unrelated note, here's an interesting process approach to the synthesis of the natural product anti-malarial drug arteminsinin (to get an overview, click here; for the original article (from which the image below was taken), click here)