Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
Yesterday was a weird day for Bristol-Myers Squibb. The company announced the results of a highly anticipated clinical trial, one combining Opdivo (nivolumab) and Yervoy (ipilimumab) in lung cancer patients. As those who follow this area know, BMS has been losing ground to Merck for the last year or two, as Merck’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab) ma… Read More
This new paper has generated a lot of headlines (Science news writeup here). It reports work on the long-sought “liquid biopsy” idea for cancer screening, the use of circulating biomarkers to detect tumors via a blood test. The idea has obvious appeal, so much appeal that many news stories over the years have gotten well… Read More
I’ve been meaning to link to this article, which is the best overview I know of for kinase inhibitors. The authors (a large multicenter team led out of Munich) characterize 243 (!) kinase inhibitors that have made it into human trials across a very wide range of the known kinase enzymes, and the result is… Read More
Three months ago, I wrote about a report that some kinds of pancreatic cancer seem to be associated with particular infections, and wondered “How many similar stories are out there that we don’t know about yet?” Well, that didn’t take long to start being answered. This recent paper in Science (from a multicenter team: Dana- Read More
EGFR is a growth-factor receptor protein that’s well known as a cancer target, and there are a number of drugs that target its kinase activity in order to shut it down. But as is also well known, many cancer cells are rather genomically unstable, and throw off mutations constantly. One of the most common problems… Read More
Okay, this paper is not going to make a lot of people happy. The authors are reviewing oncology approvals by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) from 2009 to 2013 – overall, there were 48 drugs approved for 68 indications, which sounds like good news. 24 of the 68 were approved with survival benefit shown in… Read More
A friend in the business called my attention to this paper, which is about another piece of the ubiquitination system that I was writing about here just the other day – in this case, the deubiquitinating enzyme Rpn11. There are a couple of classes of deubiquitinators – some of them use a cysteine in their… Read More
Since the topic of bacteria effects on human disease came up here just the other day, I wanted to point out a new article that comes at this idea from a different direction. This research got going when cells from pancreatic and colon tumor samples were co-cultured with human dermal fibroblasts. The cancer cell lines… Read More
Oncology drives you to some pretty strange ideas about therapy. But that’s understandable – in what other field are you trying aggressively to kill off parts of the patient’s own body? That’s why chemotherapy started off with the study of people who had been exposed to mustard gas (during the Bari bombing raid), where it… Read More
I remember reading Barry Sharpless’ big “click” chemistry paper in 2001, where he proposed the term for reactions that take place rapidly, selectively, and without any outside reagents, and proposed such techniques for the rapid assembly of diverse molecules. In the years since, the term has drifted away a bit at times to mean … Read More
