Thread by @mike_malaska

Well, this is great news!
FDA approval for vaginal yeast infections!
fiercepharma.com/pharma/scynexi…

This comes from the company that I (and many others) helped found, back in 2000-ish. I was not directly involved in this, but my colleagues (led by a former post-doc of mine) made this happen.

I sat in on some of the meetings, and worked for the same client (Merck) on parallel projects.
This started as a modified derivative of a natural product molecule called enfumafungin.

These are really fun projects. You get a complicated molecule from some extracted broth, and then have to "crack it" to attach different mecular functional groups on that modified molecule. Usually tweaking it to make better activity, PK properties, or stability.

Synthetically challenging, analytically too. These are really complicated molecules so figuring what you made can be really fun. (The natural product molecule my team worked on, 14-hydroxypaspalinine, had all the proton resonances nicely spread out.)

After development, this candidate molecule got possibly the ugliest generic name ever: "ibrexafungerp".

Yes, go ahead, say it aloud. It just naturally rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

(Runner up in my opinion is "clopidogrel" (Plavix))

So with a starting name like ibrexafungerp, a name for product like "Brexafemme" is probably the best they could do.

"Vajogerp" prolly wouldn't make the cut.

I won't speculate on market and therapeutic potential, but its always a good thing to have another drug in the clinical toolkit. Ibrexafungerp has a new mode of action.
So my congratulations to the R&D team members, past and present, who got a new drug approved!