Russian attacks are endangering Ukraine’s world-leading medicinal chemistry industry, which supplies scientists across the globe with molecular building blocks needed for early drug development.
Ukraine’s dominance in medicinal chemistry is little known beyond drug developers, who fine-tune a drug’s molecular design to give it the best chance of hitting the desired biological target in the body. Kyiv-based Enamine Ltd. has become a go-to supplier for drug-discovery scientists at academic laboratories and the largest pharmaceutical companies.
“It’s a bit like Amazon for chemistry,” said Ed Griffen, a U.K.-based medicinal chemist working with closely held Enamine on a low-cost Covid-19 antiviral pill.
Ivan Kondratov, in the middle with a dark sweater, and some of his Enamine colleagues.
Photo: Andriy Yakymenko/Enamine
Now the Russian invasion has scattered Enamine’s roughly 700 scientists across Ukraine and nearby countries as they sort out how to resume their work.
Ivan Kondratov, a senior scientist at Enamine, said he fled Kyiv on Feb. 24 to get his wife and two children, ages 10 and 6, to safety. His family is now in Münster, Germany. Mr. Kondratov, 39 years old, is staying near Lviv in western Ukraine, forbidden to leave the country like many men because of the war.
He said some colleagues remained in Kyiv, while some moved to western Ukraine and others went abroad. Enamine quickly uploaded data stored in Ukraine to servers elsewhere. The company’s laboratories and main warehouse are closed—and so far intact—although deliveries from two smaller warehouses in Riga, Latvia, and New Jersey are continuing.
Ukraine’s dominance in medicinal chemistry grew out of its Soviet history. During the Cold War, Soviet and Western chemists worked in spheres with little overlap. When the Iron Curtain fell, it revealed techniques and molecules unseen in the West. Some former Soviet scientists seized the opportunity to start companies to sell their collections of novel molecules to Western academics and drug developers. Enamine was established in 1991.
Russian shelling of Kyiv, Ukraine, neighborhoods has forced thousands to evacuate.
Photo: Christopher Occhicone for The Wall Street Journal
“For all the Eastern Bloc countries that came out of the Soviet Union that managed to keep their scientists at home, those scientists are top-notch,” said David Lewis, a professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Scientists said Enamine gives them ready access to compounds that would be time-consuming and expensive for them to build in house. Drug design is an iterative process of testing large collections of molecules against the biological target, with the aim of arriving at a molecule that fits the target, a bit like a lock and a key. Enamine provides the molecular building blocks needed to make drug developers’ tweaks, or can produce the modified molecules ready for a fresh round of testing.
“They’ve reached that level where they are the trusted partner for most of us in the U.K.,” said Ed Tate, professor of chemical biology at Imperial College London and the Francis Crick Institute, who uses collections of Enamine compounds to research new drug targets.
Even large pharmaceutical companies, which have vast libraries of molecules for early drug development, commonly use Enamine to supplement their own collections. Without companies like Enamine, the universe of molecules available to test against new disease targets would be far narrower and would likely lead to missed opportunities in drug discovery, researchers said.
“We are going to have early-stage projects that are not going to progress as well or at all because we’ve lost a bunch of potential things we could have tried,” said Derek Lowe, a drug-discovery researcher who works for Novartis AG , speaking in a personal capacity.
Life Chemicals Inc., a smaller Kyiv-based company that runs a service similar to that provided by Enamine, is trying to regroup after Russia’s invasion. Scientists who remained in Kyiv have moved flammable solvents into special storage, according to Vasily Pinchuk, who runs the company’s North American sales operation from Canada.
Enamine and Life Chemicals said they hope to resume deliveries from the Ukrainian capital soon for orders placed and prepared before the invasion. Enamine is running pilot deliveries from its Kyiv warehouse to test how long it takes to get packages out of Ukraine, Mr. Kondratov said.
A Ukrainian courier company, Nova Poshta, should be able to take parcels to the border, said Mr. Pinchuk of Life Chemicals. “As long as the facility and vicinity is not bombed, we’ll try to work and to carry out the orders from the stock that we have,” he said. Life Chemicals also has smaller warehouses in Munich and Connecticut, which have continued to send out orders for a limited range of products.
Enamine and Life Chemicals are working on contingency plans to relocate some stock and staff. A laboratory in Riga has offered bench space for up to 20 Enamine scientists. Alexey Poyarkov, who leads a team of seven scientists at Life Chemicals, said he is trying to relocate members of his team to Western Europe until the fighting is over. He said he has received offers of lab space from scientists in Austria, Italy and Greece.
Both companies said that their Kyiv facilities are intact and that they hope scientists will eventually be able to return. Mr. Kondratov said he couldn’t bear to consider the alternative.
“If we lost everything in Kyiv, all the instruments, all the labs, all the compounds, that would be a disaster,” he said. “Even though we know all the chemistry, from zero, it will take years.”
Write to Denise Roland at [email protected]
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