As is our tradition, here you have our figures about projects and products of 2014. Compiling this info takes only a few minutes (advantages of having everything recorded) and allows us to offer our clients, collaborators and potential clients some numbers that reflect what we do.
Figures for started and completed projects are quite similar to the ones in 2013. Our success rate (represents the projects where we did deliver products) has slightly reduced to 94%. The reasons: most of our projects were connected with custom synthesis of impurities and metabolites of APIs and agrochemicals. To be honest, some of those structures were pretty challenging. You know, things that when you carry out the synthesis in a 3,000 thousand liters reactor you obtain in very small percentages… because they are usually hard to prepare. Some projects were also completed out of the expected deadline due to unexpected synthetic issues which are always discussed with the customer in real time, but the most important: all projects with a critical deadline driven by biology (i.e., preclinical trials, in vitro assays and so on) were completed successfully before the deadline. That’s commitment.
Once again, our longest linear route in 2014 was 15 steps. Our winner was related with drug discovery, a product that honestly does not look like a drug, but working in PPI inhibitors involves many times lengthy and complicated synthesis of surprising compounds.
Finally, the figures related with products. Only 466 products against 621, a 25% drop. The reason: our clients are giving us the projects involving long routes, challenging chemistry and so on. We would love to carry out the synthesis of products in 4 or 5 steps, and preparing hundreds of derivatives… but this is not happening. For us, they reserve the hardest part. As they say, we live to serve.
