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Biological drugs can offer high potency and selectivity; however, this class of therapeutics often shows poor stability upon oral administration and during subsequent circulation. This Review highlights the materials and methods used to deliver biological drugs, and discusses how these approaches can improve their pharmacokinetics.
Numerous dynamic molecular crystals whose physical properties can be switched by external stimuli have recently been developed. This Review discusses how the precise control of the electron, proton and molecular movement within the crystals through the application of external stimuli can lead to considerable changes in their properties.
Natural products are a prime source of innovative molecular fragments and privileged scaffolds for drug discovery and chemical biology. Advanced machine-learning approaches can help analyse and design synthetically accessible, natural-product-derived, compound libraries and provide insight into the high selectivity of such compounds.
Chemical protein synthesis can enable the preparation of proteins containing post-translational modifications or unnatural variations such as D-amino acids. Such modified proteins are not easily fabricated by other methods. This Review provides an overview of the current approaches for the chemical synthesis of proteins.
In enzyme-catalysed metabolic pathways, substrate channelling often directs the movement of intermediates from one active site to the next. Intramolecular tunnels, electrostatic interactions and chemical swing arms pass intermediates from one enzyme to the next, enhancing pathway catalysis. Introducing mechanisms of bounded diffusion in chemical cascades can increase selectivity, transient rates and overall yield.
In a remote functionalization, reaction occurs at a site distant from the site of initial activation. This Review discusses attempts to achieve this challenging goal with a particular focus on reactions that exploit alkene isomerizations to effect transit of the catalyst from a reactive alkene to a distant sp3 centre.
