Organic chemistry looks like a baffling parade of hieroglyphs to the uninitiated. Chemists at drug makers Pfizer and Merck are already testing various skeletal editing reactions. Researchers are excited but also wary of over-hyping a young field.
In the past two years, there has been an explosion in the number of papers published relating to 'skeletal editing', a technique that allows chemists to precisely edit a molecule by deleting, adding or swapping single atoms in its core.
Although many of these methods are early in development, researchers hope skeletal editing could revolutionize how organic chemists design molecules, dramatically speeding up the drug-discovery process.