The Synaptic Leap

Last week I was talking with Lei Liu from Tsinghua University, who was visiting Sydney to give a talk on his synthetic methodology research. I showed him the compounds that are the starting point of the open source drug discovery project for malaria, the arylpyrrole set. He said he'd seen these compounds before, in a different context, and after a little searching around we found the relevant paper here.

The first paper arising from the open science coordinated by this site has just been published here. Though the project is very much ongoing, it's super exciting to be able to publish a paper as a milestone. i.e. one can run an open project, and once a certain point has been reached, one can submit a paper for traditional peer review to act as a reviewed summary of progress.
 
Many people are thanked in the original article, but I'd like to say thank you to everyone who helped the project on this site, particularly you industry/process guys - your advice was readily forthcoming and of a particularly high quality.

Saw this very interesting article/development. Intel sponsoring research at top universities, but heavily encouraging the projects to be open source and the universities not to take out patents. A bold step, very counter to the philosophy that is so familiar to any current academic. From the website:
 

We now have two resolutions of PZQ! (or, more correctly, PZQ precursors) The previously-posted resolution (A, see scheme below) involves taking PZQ itself, removing the cyclohexanoyl group to give PZQamine, resolving this amine with a derivative of tartaric acid, then re-introducing the cyclohexanoyl group. The second (B) involves the use of an intermediate in a commercial-scale synthesis of PZQ – resolution with tartaric acid, followed by a swap of benzoyl for cyclohexanoyl during the completion of the PZQ synthesis.
 

A lot has been happening here in the last few weeks, so I ought to summarise:

I recently gave a talk on open science at Ignite Sydney. These talks are a real challenge in that you have 5 minutes to get across an idea, with the slides rotating every 15 seconds behind you. The event was in a cool club/gallery in the middle of Sydney, and is the first talk I've ever given where I was preceded by a beatbox act. Apparently I was the first scientist to go to Ignite Sydney.
 

To host the raw data from the Pictet-Spengler approach to the enantioselective synthesis of PZQ Michael has started an Electronic Lab Notebook. We're using the open source Southampton Lab Blog interface for this, since we're collaborating with them on a couple of things related to this site.
 
Given that it's open source, the lab blog system can be changed and enhanced by anyone. This is a great chance to make the lab blog perfect for experimental organic chemistry, e.g:
 
1. How do we best report TLC data - at the moment we're taking photos, but this is cumbersome.

It's been a great week for the PZQ project, since we've had an injection of real help from the people we most need - process chemists. Much of this has arisen from a discussion I started on LinkedIn, which then became emails, but all participants have either actively participated on this site, or granted permission for the posting of information here. Nick Tyrell from Almac Sciences has already provided a huge amount of great advice for several aspects of the synthesis, mostly for the resolution of PZQamine.