Pharmaceutical substances preface

Pharmaceutical Substances
Preface to the Online Edition Update August 2006
The online version of Pharmaceutical Substances is now 3 years old and finds steadily
increasing reception. This is due to its topicality by biannual updates with new entries,
corrections and additions and the versatile search functions.
The recent update has brought 10 new drug substances and more than 40 revised
monographs of important drugs (e.g. Atorvastatin, Beclometasone, Citalopram,
Ciprofloxacin, Efavirenz, Fluticasone, Imipenem, Oseltamivir, Oxcarbazepine,
Rosuvastatin, Ubidecarenone). In many cases the synthesis processes had to be
complemented or changed. The ACS Journal “Organic Process Research and
Development” is giving many valuable hints for the industrially applied synthesis
processes. The patent and literature citations for important drugs have been
complemented and we began to name the “Key intermediates” after the synthesis
schemes. In a few cases, in which we had reliable information, we also mentioned the
bulk drug manufacturers (e.g. Imipenem, Ubidecarenone).
With regard to the patent literature a new trend is quite remarkable: more and more
“Generics companies” (e.g. Teva, Hexal, Ranbaxy, Dr.Reddy´s et al.) are filing patents
for improvements of late synthesis steps and polymorphic forms, but also new substance
patents. Where it seemed useful to us we included such patent references.
The list of abbreviations has been revised and it is in line with the corresponding lists of
the ACS journals.
Mergers and Acquisitions in the Pharmaceutical Industry are steadily ongoing. As a
consequence many familiar and famous company names disappeared (e.g. Aventis,
Boehringer Mannheim, Fujisawa, Hoechst, ICI, Knoll, Pharmacia, Squibb, Upjohn,
Yamanouchi, Zeneca), new company names appeared (e.g. Actelion, Astellas,
AstraZeneca, Daiichi-Sankyo), and many product brands have also been changed. This
requires countless “corrections”, which have to be made in time. The authors try hard to
be up-to-date in this respect.
The authors are deeply indebted to all collaborators who contributed to the development
of the online version and its updates. We are very grateful to the colleges of the FIZ
CHEMIE BERLIN, namely Ingo Adamczyk (coordination), Martin Hohlberg (graphics),
Ulrich Quandt (data collection) and René Deplanque (Managing Director), InfoChem,
namely Josef Eiblmaier (Project Manager), Josef Oberckal (software programming), Jakob
Ruhdorfer (data processing), and Peter Löw (Managing Director), and, of course, Georg
Thieme Verlag, namely Thomas Krimmer (Marketing Manager Thieme Chemistry) and
Klaus Köberlein (coordination of data transfer and building the full text index and the
html pages). They all did an excellent job!
Frankfurt a. M., July 2006

Source: http://pharmaceutical-substances.thieme.com/prod/preface.pdf