Despite tremendous challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry, it continues with its commitment to innovation and the discovery of novel drugs to address unmet medical needs. Indeed, medicinal chemists face a challenge of their own. Trying to survive in a changing environment where pharma is focusing on biologics drug candidates will require chemists to adapt.

CHEManager International asked R&D experts of chemical and pharmaceutical companies to elaborate on their research strategy and share their opinion with our readers. In detail, we interviewed professionals ranging from CEOs to heads of R&D and process development about:

The crucial success factors in chemical and pharmaceutical research.

Prof. Jochen Maas: Œ The crucial factor in chemical research will be people — well-educated and with the right empathy and motivation for research. Those people have to be brought together independently of their organizations — academia, industry or biotech. And this requires new and innovative ideas of collaboration, which have already started to be implemented.

“The crucial factor … will be
people — well-educated and
with the right empathy and
motivation for research.”

Prof. Jochen Maas,
Head R&D FF,
Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland

The role of information technology tools in developing reaction routes and processes.

Prof. Jochen Maas: The role of software tools to predict and develop reaction routes and processes for given target molecules depends on the research area: A lot of processes already can be predicted quite accurately by in silico approaches — e.g., absorption. Other areas like metabolism will require much more effort to achieve a similar level.

Challenges and changes affecting the work of R&D chemists in the future.

Prof. Jochen Maas:  R&D chemists will have to be extremely flexible in the future: At least industry preferences for specific modalities — like small molecules, peptides, proteins, oligonucleotides — will probably change much more rapidly than in the past.