Chemistry World Blog

Suffering from diarrhoea? Abdominal pain? If it’s not the norovirus it could be … chewing gum. Doctors in this week’s BMJ have warned of the danger of sugar-free chewing gum after the cases of two patients who reported these symptoms and lost about a fifth of their body weight. Despite extensive investigation, doctors were at a loss until they quizzed the two patients about their diet. It then turned out both had inadvertantly consumed huge amounts of sorbitol in the form of sugar-free gum and sweets.
‘Sorbitol has laxative properties and is poorly absorbed by the small intestine. The first patient (a 21 year old woman) chewed large amounts of sugar-free gum, accounting for a total daily dose of 18-20g sorbitol (one stick of chewing gum contains about 1.25g sorbitol). The second patient (a 46 year old man) reported chewing 20 sticks of sugar-free gum and eating up to 200g of sweets each day, which together contained around 30g sorbitol.’
Luckily, there’s a happy ending. Both patients were immediately placed on a sorbitol free diet and have since recovered.

In this week’s Chemistry World business news round-up, we see more interest in the jatropha plant, watch the meningitis vaccine competition heat up, and wonder where all the new drugs have gone to.

Chemical Industry

Explosion investigated:
A December 19 blast and fire which killed four workers and injured a dozen people at Jacksonville, Florida-based chemical company T2 Laboratories was caused by uncontrolled high pressures and temperatures, said the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB). The reactor vessel ruptured when organic materials were heated with metallic sodium during the production of a petrol additive called methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl. Though the vessel’s steel walls were 3 inches thick and designed for high pressure, some of its parts were recovered a quarter of a mile away from the site.

ICI ex-chairman dies:
Sir John Harvey-Jones, the former chairman of ICI, has died at the age of 83. He had transformed the firm in the 1980s, reviving its fortunes by significant restructuring. ICI has now been purchased by Akzo Nobel.

Medical and Pharmaceuticals

New drugs scarcer: 
The US Food and Drug Association (FDA) approved only 19 new drugs in 2007, the fewest since 1983. Explanations for the recent slump ranged from the FDA’s increasing strictness, to drug companies focusing on new uses for already-approved products; or tackling more complex disease causes, rather than simply preventing common symptoms.

Acute toxicity test redundant:
A European pharmaceutical company initiative has concluded that the single-dose acute toxicity test – used before human clinical trials to identify a medicine’s lethal dose in animals – is redundant. ‘We hope that the regulators will accept the evidence and no longer require this test prior to testing in man,’ said Brian Ager, Director General of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

More promise for resveratrol:
Massachusetts-based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals said that an early-stage study suggested its resveratrol-based formulation helped lower blood sugar levels in diabetics. It is the first study to show beneficial effects in humans, rather than mice or rats. The company has previously reported a series of promising compounds for treating diabetes, but said a drug wouldn’t get to market until at least 2012.

Genzyme in cholesterol pact:
US biotech company Genzyme has strengthened its drug pipeline by spending $325 million (£166 million) on securing partial rights to a cholesterol-lowering drug, mipomersen, from Isis Pharmaceuticals. If Isis gets FDA approval for the drug next year, it could be on the market by 2011.

Meningitis vaccine competition heats up: 
Swiss drug company Novartis said Phase II trials showed its Menveo meningitis vaccine generated immune responses in infants. The vaccine, which should be filed for EU and US regulatory approval this year, competes with Menactra, a meningitis vaccine for teenagers and adults developed by Sanofi-aventis; while GSK is also developing a meningitis vaccine, currently in Phase II trials.

Energy

Jatropha excites fuel-testers:
German carmaker Daimler, US agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland and Bayer CropScience are teaming up to explore the tropical plant Jatropha as a biodiesel fuel. The hardy Jatropha has never been professionally cultivated but can be grown on barren land. Daimler has already investigated its biodiesel potential; the partners now hope to develop production and quality standards for Jatropha-based fuel.

Agrochemicals

DuPont herbicide:
US chemical giant DuPont has received registration approval from the Environmental Protection Agency for a herbicide, Agility SG, which controls a broad spectrum of weeds. DuPont say the herbicide will save farmers the hassle of mixing multiple products, since it contains a blend of four active ingredients.

Scientists in France studying a local deposit of 55 million-year-old amber have unexpectedly isolated a natural product never seen before. Akino Jossang and colleagues suggest the compound’s precursor came from an ancient tree related to a species now found only in the Amazon rainforest – indicating Paris once enjoyed a rather more tropical climate than it does today.

The team, from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, were trying to trace the source of the tree resin that fossilised to form the amber – discovered in the Oise river area of the Paris basin in 1997. As part of these studies, Jossang powdered some of the amber and extracted it with solvent – isolating the new compound, which the team has named ‘quesnoin’.

‘It is very difficult to isolate pure known compounds in amber, so to discover a new structure was unexpected and exceptional,’ Jossang told Chemistry World.

Carbon-based curiosities has awarded the coveted title of Best Protecting Group 2007 to masked boronic acids and champions Marty Burke’s work at Illinois. He used N-methyliminodiacetic acid to mask the boronic acid so useful for Suzuki coupling reactions (DOIs: 10.1021/ja078129x and 10.1021/ja0716204).

Burke’s now got cosy with ‘a major chemical company’ which he told us is going to supply a whole series of bifunctional masked haloboronates (eg, picture left) off the shelf. Why? He reckons they’ll clip together, like modular units, to build up a natural product. As you can see, you’ve got your double bonds, then there’s your rings, and so on, that you could clip into each other. The team haven’t worked out how to automate this yet, but it’s pretty analogous to peptide coupling for making amino acids. If this works, it seems Suzuki-based syntheses are set to become even more useful in the pharmaceutical industry.

I can’t let mention of CBC’s great blog go by without a picture of the winning lolnano back in December (check this out if you want to know what it’s all about):

In this week’s Chemistry World business news round-up, we cover big pharma’s latest moves, universal flu vaccines, and solar power with molten salts.

Chemical Industry

Mitsubishi fire:
A blaze at Mitsubishi Chemical’s Kamashima facility on 21 December has killed four operators working in the area. The fire broke out in the cracking furnace area of the company’s Number 2 ethylene plant, shutting down ethylene and benzene production.

ICI sale completed:
Akzo Nobel‘s purchase of ICI completed on schedule on 2 January, with ICI share trading on the London Stock Exchange ceasing from 8am on 3 January.

IBM accused of toxic discharges:
The long-running dispute between International Business Machines (IBM) and residents around IBM’s former manufacturing site in Endicott, New York, is heading to court. Lawyers for IBM and the plaintiffs have been in discussions since 2004 over solvent discharges at the site. The talks failed to reach an agreement, leading 90 plaintiffs to file a lawsuit on 3 January.

Kenya troubles:
British companies including Unilever and GSK have stepped up security following unrest in Kenya following the disputed election.

Medical and Pharmaceuticals

Serious Fraud inquiry:
UK-based pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, plus US firm Eli Lilly, have been ordered to release confidential documents to the UK Serious Fraud Office as part of ongoing investigations into alleged bribes paid to Saddam Hussein’s regime. The inquiry follows a 2005 UN report listing over 2000 companies that could have been involved in paying bribes to secure contracts under the UN’s Oil-For-Food programme.

Phase I flu:
Acambis has announced positive preliminary results following the Phase I trails of its universal flu vaccine, which is designed to target a region of the virus common to all influenza ‘A’ strains, including all pandemic strains and H5N1. Acambis said the vaccine successfully generated an immune response, and was well-tolerated. The company is now looking to partner with a larger pharmaceutical business to continue developing the drug.

No scar from failed trial?:
Renovo chief executive Mark Ferguson says that its experimental anti-scarring drug Juvista failed a clinical trial because of a technical hitch. The drug, designed to prevent scarring following surgery, is believed by analysts to be a potential blockbuster. News of the failure saw Renovo shares fall 25 per cent.

Merck schizophrenia drug deal:
US drug company Merck has agreed with Swiss firm Addex Pharmaceuticals to develop a candidate schizophrenia drug, in a deal that could earn Addex up to $702 million if drug development reaches certain milestones.

Takeda seeks Actos diabetes drug replacement:
Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical is seeking FDA approval for alogliptin, a diabetes drug to replace Actos, the word’s biggest-selling diabetes medicine, due to loose patent protection in 2011. Actos has been in the news recently because it is in the same class as GSK’s Avandia, which has been linked with higher risk of heart attack.

Wuxi buys into US:
Chinese pharmaceutical research company Wuxi PharmaTech has agreed to buy US company AppTec Laboratory Services for $151 million. The deal improves Wuxi’s biotechnology expertise. Wuxi already carries out research for nine of the world’s top 10 drug companies.

Energy

Solar competition:
US aerospace and industrial products maker Hamilton Sundstrand, and private equity firm US Renewables Group, have announced they will commercialise a new type of solar power plant. The facility uses the sun to heat molten mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate salts, which retain the heat until needed, when they are used to generate steam to power a turbine. While the technology was first demonstrated in the 1980s, the companies believe high energy prices now make it commercially viable.

Agrochemicals

Bayer weedkiller:
Bayer have developed a new weed control for corn, base on a combination of isoxaflutole with thienecarbazone-methyl, a new member of the sulfonyl-amino-carbonyl-triazoline herbicide family. Bayer say that, pending regulatory approval, they hope to introduce the product in the US in 2009.

Happy New Year to everyone out there.

Causing reasonable excitement among us editors this morning is the new journal metric/citation analysis website SCImago. Finally, an alternative to Thomson’s Impact Factors.

SCImago not only offers h-indices for journals, but also a new indicator all of their own: the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator (read the maths here). They’ve apparently developed this from Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithm. In addition to measuring the average number of citations to papers a journal publishes, it also weights those citations – citations from a higher SJR-ranked journal are worth more than those from a lower-ranked journal.

Another benefit is that the data comes from Elsevier’s Scopus database, which in my experience is somewhat more comprehensive and accurate than Web of Knowledge.

And finally, the whole thing is freely availabe. Which is nice.

I’ve had great fun working out which metric gives the journals I work on the highest placing on the list – now you can choose from SJR, h-index, papers published, citations per paper, etc, etc.

Tieing in nicely with the article in this January’s print Chemistry World (How good is UK chemistry?, pp 42–23), you can also use the data to analyse a country’s performance. The data pretty much reflects what Evidence Ltd found from their analysis of Thomson’s data.