Synthesis restarts at Kyiv firms

Abstract

Russian troops have withdrawn from territory around Kyiv, Ukraine, and pharmaceutical chemical firms are restarting their labs with the aim of returning to some sort of normal. Kyiv-based companies such as Enamine and Life Chemicals are among the world’s largest providers of the screening compounds and building-block chemicals that drug discovery firms need for early-stage research. When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 , the companies had hoped that the disruption to their synthesis work would last only a few days. But it soon became clear that it would not be safe to keep these sites running. Now, work is resuming. On April 7 , Andrey Tolmachov, Enamine ’s CEO, announced that the company was heading back to work. The firm would avoid performing large-scale synthesis to start with, he said, but “we confirm that a major part of our synthetic operations can be performed, and that our chemists and