As usual, the figures for started and completed projects are not very significant, but they are a 10% higher than in 2017, because 2018 was indeed one of the busiest years in GalChimia’s history. We started big projects with several clients, set up new facilities in the Barcelona Science Parc (PCB), facilities that we have expanded by the beginning of this year, and we started (finally!) the construction of our new state-of-the-art labs.
Obviously all this fuss affected our availability to take new projects. So the projects figures reflect in fact that in 2018 we took more long term medicinal chemistry projects and less custom synthesis projects. Still, some of those projects had critical deadlines (in vivo preclinical assays, declaration of candidates and so) that were met. Only one project was delivered late. And even more important, only a couple of projects delivered no molecules: two failures only out of 139 completed projects, which sets our success rate to an incredible 98.5%. That figure will probably go down this year, once we start taking again high risk custom synthesis projects. Most of those projects are related with the synthesis of unknown impurities and so, and believe me, our clients do not come to us with the easiest things.
Our longest route in 2010 was, again, 15 steps. Linear route and therefore the winner. But we have plenty of candidates for the second place, because our medchem projects involve the preparation of many molecules with 12, 13 and 14 linear steps. Have we commented before that our clients do not give us the easiest things?
And finally the figures related with products. We delivered 1194 molecules last year and as expected with so many medchem projects, most of these products were in the less than 100 mg range. Some of them progress further, but it is clear that the bulk of the work, for our headquarter and our lab in Madrid, are products for the H2L and LO stages. In our lab of Barcelona, this year we only worked on process development projects, so we delivered only a few product samples… but a full manufacturing process is already running in our client plant.
So in summary, a busy, thrilling year!
