COVID-19

Dear Partners,

Necessitated by the unprecedented situation created by Covid-19, several industry events and tradeshows across the world have been postponed or stand cancelled. While we were looking forward to meet you, we at Piramal Pharma Solutions have had to take several precautionary measures to protect both our employees and customers, worldwide.

As we move forward in these extraordinary times, we want to assure you that that we are operational by taking the right safety measures and abundant precautions to ensure that we continue to support you and your patients.

While all of us are working remotely for now, you can schedule a discussion with us and we would be glad to help ensure you meet your pharmaceutical development and supply needs and thereby, your clinical and commercial timelines.

Please feel free to reach out to us at:
Stuart.Needleman@piramal.com

Our best wishes to colleagues, friends and family.

Best Regards,
Piramal Pharma Solutions

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Deuterated Compounds: Optimizing Drug Stability

Drug discovery has been a very time consuming and expensive process as out of every 10,000 compounds, only one becomes a drug. Poor metabolic stability and toxicity has been a major bottleneck for any drug discovery program and to overcome these issues, medicinal chemists have started investigating deuterated compounds as new chemical entities with improved properties.

A deuterated drug is a small molecule in which one or more of the hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium. As deuterium and hydrogen have nearly the same physical properties, deuterium substitution is the smallest structural change that can be made to a molecule.

Advantages:

A major potential advantage of deuterated compounds is the possibility of faster, more efficient, less costly clinical trials, because of the extensive testing the non-deuterated versions have previously undergone. 

A strong research pipeline:

Growing Opportunity for Deuterated Drugs

As per the companies in this research, the current market value of “deuterium switching” could be more than $1 billion, and the greatest discoveries in the field are yet to occur.

It is estimated that less than 10% of all FDA-approved drugs are amenable to deuteration because of their chemical structure, or because the body breaks them down in a way that isn’t affected by deuterium.

 

Market Outlook:

With FDA finally approving the first deuterated drug – Deutetrabenazine in Apr’17, after 4 decades of clinical trials over deuterated compounds, can this be adopted as a bigger lifecycle management strategy?

From an initial desire to extend drug clearance times, companies are now finding a broad range of potential uses for deuterium in drug molecules. As a result, claiming deuterated versions of new molecules in patent applications is emerging as a trend for the large pharma companies.

The growth of “deuterium switch” not only depends on the success of the current molecules in research but also the ability of the companies to explain the significantly higher advantages of this switch for lifecycle management of existing blockbusters.

Deuterated API Capabilities:

Piramal Pharma Solutions, with its FDA approved facilities across North America, Europe and Asia, provides API development and manufacturing services across the globe. Our US FDA approved facility in Torcan, Canada is well equipped to handle deuterated APIs:

Piramal healthcare Canada Limited is licensed through the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) for the following activities:

Posted in Newsletters on Jun 28, 2018