Life Science Spotlight

While transition metals drive powerful bond-forming reactions in synthetic chemistry, their use for covalent modification of biomolecules has been largely underexplored…

The installation of alkyl substituents through C(sp³)-C(sp³) coupling is in high demand in synthetic and medicinal chemistry. While some strategies towards…

We chemists love building molecular complexity efficiently and in as few steps as possible. This allows us to transform readily accessible…

Until now, direct activation of the C─O bond was an unresolved problem, mainly due to high dissociation energy (approximately 96 kcal/mol)…

KRAS has been in the focus of cancer research for quite some time as it has been recognized as a key…

Optimization of PROTACs for in vivo applications is non-trivial, thought not impossible. A nice example on this topic represents freshly published…

Although Hetero-Diels-Alder will play a central role, I am not going to speak about gender. Not today. Instead, I would like…

About 85% of disease-related proteins lack suitable binding pockets for conventional drug discovery. While RNA-targeting approaches like siRNAs have shown promise…

The field of PROTACs continues to evolve. A recent Nature Communications paper describes another self-assembling nano-PROTAC that co-degrades androgen receptor (AR)…

Researchers often steer the design of CRBN-based PROTACs to achieve selective degradation of a single target while suppressing degradation of CRBN…

How can bioorthogonal chemistry and mitochondrial targeting rewrite cancer immunotherapy? By creating enzyme-responsive nanoparticles that self-assemble in tumors and chemically “click”…

While biotech faces a funding downturn, radioligand therapy (RLT) is attracting major investments. The field stands at an important inflection point…

Well, not quite yet. But maybe soon. Frontier Medicines evaluated E3 ligase DCAF2 (DTL/CDT2), as a novel ligase for targeted protein…

It doesn’t happen very often to see a direct comparison of a molecular glue degrader and PROTAC, as it has been…

How do you study the 90% of proteins that lack small-molecule binding partners? By tagging the protein! The problem is that…

Sumon Pratihar, Eric T. Kool and his team from Stanford University just published new paper in 𝘈𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘵𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘦, unlocking a new…

E-STUB: A Precision Tool for Mapping E3 Ligase Substrates In march 2025, colleagues from Dana Faber and The Broad Institute published…

Top notch medchem building blocks got unlocked. Chemists from Enamine Ltd. published a robust route to saturated azabicyclic scaffolds (Angewandte Chemie):…

Why nucleoside analogs matter and why they’re hard to make Nucleoside analogs (NAs) are among the most successful drug classes in…

Direct monitoring of a binding interaction between biomolecules and their ligands is one of the cornerstones of early drug discovery, chemical…

Wang et al. report a new copper-catalyzed methodology for C(sp³)-N cross-coupling of unactivated alkyl halides with diverse nucleophiles under thermal conditions…

Then I would like to invite you to read our paper in RSC Chem. Biol. which also represents my first corresponding…

For decades, creating proteins with extended backbones (β, γ, δ-amino acids) inside living cells has been challenging. Researchers at University of…

🔸 50 new CRBN neosubstrates🔸 3 bona fide degraders🔸 MS-proteomic platform expanding druggable proteome All of this packed in single paper❗…

My colleagues from The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) (Rezart Zhubi, Andreas C. Joerger, Stefan Knapp) just published a paper “𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬…

DNA methyltransferases (MTases) can recognize specific DNA sequences and transfer a methyl group from the S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM) cofactor to a target…

Researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong discovered an alternative mechanism in which organo-selenium acts as a C-H hydrogen bond…

Finding potent small-molecule E3 ligase binders is notoriously tough. Here’s how teams from AstraZeneca, Pharmaron, and X‑Chem collaborated to overcome this…

Induced proximity is more than ubiquitination and targeted protein degradation. In the recent literature we have seen proximity-inducing modalities for phosphorylation…

 The number of spirocyclic-N-heterocycles has increased dramatically in the recent years. From 10,000 in 2023 ➡️ 90,000 in 2025 (Substructure search…

Imagine a scaffold hopping strategy where you don’t have to re-design your synthetic route for each scaffold. You don’t need Jedi…

The microcosmos of biological processes is complex and full of surprises. This is also the case for a new preprint from…

Do you like to Smile? Or perhaps you’re a fan of rearrangement reactions like me? If so, you’ll want to check…

Recently published paper in Nature Communications claims (as the title says): “General method for carbon–heteroatom cross-coupling reactions via semiheterogeneous red-light metallaphotocatalysis”…

Forget your fume hood, E. coli just became your new reaction vessel 💡 What’s new?Researchers have shown that a classic organic transformation…