NEWS OF THE WEEK
PUBLISHING: Both ACS and RSC will
establish new journals in 2010
R
EADERS AND AUTHORS will have several new
peer-reviewed chemistry journals to peruse next year. The American Chemical Society will begin publishing ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters in January. The society has appointed Dennis C. Liotta, an organic chemistry professor at Emory University and director of the Emory Institute for Drug Discovery, as editor in chief. ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters will publish experimental and theoretical results in pure and applied medicinal chemistry on topics including discovery and design, biological evaluation, delivery, and pharmacology. It will include sections describing significant new patents and drug discovery tools. The online-only journal will serve as a companion to ACS’s Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, which will subsequently concentrate on full articles and reviews. “We want to make ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters the premier journal for communicating high-quality results in medicinal chemistry and related fields,” Liotta says. Liotta’s “broad background in drug discovery gives him a unique opportunity to attract high-quality medicinal chemistry contributions to the new journal,” says William J. Greenlee, a medicinal chemist at Merck Research Laboratories in Kenilworth, N.J., and editor of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry’s Perspectives section. Liotta, whose research focuses on the discovery and development of anticancer, anti-inflammatory, and
antiviral therapeutic agents, “is well-known for his impressive accomplishments in academia, as an industry consultant and company founder, and as the inventor of two major FDA-approved drugs for treatment of HIV infection,” Greenlee says. Liotta earned a B.A. in chemistry at Queens College in 1970 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the City University of New York in 1974. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Ohio State University, he joined Emory in 1976 as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 1988. Also this coming January, ACS will publish the first issues of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters and ACS Chemical Neuroscience (C&EN, May 25, page 34, and June 29, page 9). ASAP articles from the journals are already available online. The society will begin copublishing the Journal of Chemical Education with the ACS Division of Chemical Education that same month (C&EN, Oct. 19, page 10). On the other side of the Atlantic, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) will launch three monthly chemistry journals. Polymer Chemistry will publish communications, reviews, and full papers on synthetic and biological macromolecules starting early next year. The society’s MedChemComm will debut in mid-2010 and will focus on medicinal chemistry research in concise research and review articles. Also in midyear, RSC will introduce Chemical Science, which it says will publish “findings of exceptional significance from across the chemical sciences.” RSC notes that the journal will complement its flagship Chemical Communications and Chemical Society Reviews journals and will allow authors to present “accounts of their novel research without page restrictions.”— JO N ROU/EMO RY U
CHEMISTRY JOURNALS BURGEON
Liotta will be the editor in chief of ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.
SOPHIE ROVNER
PHARMA BUSINESS BMS is splitting off nutrition company to focus on biopharmaceuticals Bucking an industry trend toward diversification, Bristol-Myers Squibb is splitting off its Mead Johnson Nutrition business as an independent company so it can focus on its own biopharmaceutical operations. After holding an initial public offering (IPO) of Mead stock in February, Bristol-Myers is looking to liquidate its ownership stake entirely. “Now is the right time to move forward with a split-off, given the excellent performance of Mead Johnson since the IPO earlier this year and our confidence in the current and future performance of our biopharmaceuticals business,” BristolMyers CEO James M. Cornelius said when
he announced the plan last week. “With a successful execution of this split-off, we fully consider ourselves a biopharma company.” Bristol-Myers owns 170 million shares, or 83%, of the infant-formula maker. It is giving its shareholders the opportunity to exchange some, none, or all of their Bristol-Myers shares for shares of Mead. Along with disposing of the Mead stock, the exchange will reduce the number of Bristol-Myers shares that are outstanding and result in a higher earnings-pershare ratio. A potential downside, stock analysts at investment firm Credit Suisse point
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out, is that the split-off removes BristolMyers’ last source of earnings diversification and concentrates rewards and risks in just one sector. Many of Bristol-Myers’ competitors in the pharmaceutical industry, in fact, are embracing diversification by developing businesses in vaccines, generic drugs, and animal health. As he explained in a conference call with analysts, Cornelius believes that a smaller and more efficient company focused on serious unmet medical needs and backed by a strong R&D organization actually has “a competitive advantage for trying to execute this strategy.”—ANN THAYER
