Dr. Yongkui Sun, Vice President, Greater China Lead, External Scientific Affairs,Worldwide Licensing and Acquisitions, MSD R&D (China) Co., Ltd, delivered a lecture entitled “Merck Catalysis Needs for Drug Discovery, Development and Commercialization” at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) on August 28, 2012 at the invitation of Professor Kuiling Ding, Director of SIOC. The lecture was chaired by Professor Long Lu. Based on his own R&D experiences at Merck over the years, Dr. Sun emphasized in his lecture that the catalysis plays a very important role in drug discovery, development and commercialization. He talked about the establishment of Merck Catalysis Center, and the top catalysis needs in drug discovery, development and commercialization identified at Merck. In particular, Dr. Sun discussed what is common and what is different in the catalysis needs of medicinal chemistry and process chemistry, and what the drivers are for the difference.  Describing the top catalysis needs identified at Merck in 2007 and how they have evolved through the internal and external collaboration efforts, Dr. Sun highlighted the importance of better communication of chemistry needs of the pharmaceutical industry to the external scientific community, and the importance of more industry collaboration with leading academic institutions such as SIOC, particularly on basic research that is industrially important.

　　　  After the lecture, a discussion session was organized among the Merck scientists (Drs. Yongkui Sun, Kun Liu, Lihu Yang, Max Dang, and Yongxin Han) and SIOC professors (Professors Long Lu, Jinbo Hu, Chaozhong Li, Guosheng Liu, Qilong Shen, Xingang Zhang, and Yong Guo) with the focus on the recent achievements in fluorine chemistry at SIOC. The discussion session was chaired by Director Kuiling Ding. The SIOC professors introduced their recent research progress in fluorine chemistry, and the Merck scientists showed strong interest in SiOC’s fluorine chemistry. Both sides planned to explore collaboration opportunities in fluorine chemistry in the near future.