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.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Cancer"

• Cancer

  The BRCA1 Gene: Trouble, Quantified

  17 September, 2018

  Add this to the (increasingly long) list of papers whose basic research plans would once have gotten a net dropped over your head. It’s looking at variations in the BRCA1 gene, the one that is famously associated with breast cancer risk. There is no doubt at all that there are mutations in this gene that raise… Read More

• Biological News

  Switching On Innate Immunity

  11 September, 2018

  Cells couldn’t have a hope of working if they weren’t tightly spatially organized. The nucleus vs. the cytosol (and the cell membrane itself) are the two most obvious partitions, and then you have specialized organelles like the mitochondria, et very much cetera, dividing things further. Life itself is organized around things being diff… Read More

• Biological News

  Cancer Cells Are Even Worse Than We Thought

  29 August, 2018

  There are a lot of cancer cell lines out there, and many of them get used a lot, too. It’s not surprising, in a way, because these are cells that have already (and unfortunately) proven themselves to be robust and fast-growing, so many of these lines tend to take to cell culture conditions pretty well. Read More

• Cancer

  Real-Time Approval

  22 August, 2018

  Here’s an example of the current regulatory framework – you may like it, you may not, but if you’re doing drug research you should know that it’s going on. The way it’s traditionally worked – for decades – has been that a company develops a drug, runs clinical trials, etc., puts together a (huge) data… Read More

• Biological News

  A Close Look at a Cancer Genome

  19 July, 2018

  Ever since gene sequencing became feasible (for several values of “feasible”!) it’s been of great interest to look at the genetic material of cancerous cells. It’s been clear from very early on that there are many changes, mutations, rearrangements, shifts, etc. in a cancer cell’s DNA, and it’s been equally clear… Read More

• Cancer

  Why Not Target DNA? Well. . .

  28 June, 2018

  There are all sorts of small-molecule drugs that bind to protein targets. Active sites of enzymes are, of course, a big subset of those, but there are plenty of enzymes whose allosteric sites are known to host synthetic ligands as well. Membrane receptor and ion channel proteins get both of those mechanisms too, and then… Read More

• Cancer

  More Thoughts on AbbVie’s Rova-T Implosion

  5 June, 2018

  I wrote a couple of months ago about the disappointing results that AbbVie had obtained with their cancer stem cell therapy “Rova-T” (rovalpituzumab tesirine) in small-cell lung cancer. This was the antibody-drug conjugate that they’d purchased from Stemcentryx – OK, let’s clarify that, they bought Stemcentryx out comp… Read More

• Cancer

  A Glioblastoma Vaccine? Not Yet.

  30 May, 2018

  If you get your biomedical breaking news from the British press, you will have heard all about a very promising vaccine treatment for glioblastoma. (“Remarkably promising” – BBC. “Could add years” – The Guardian. And there’s the Daily Mail (naturally), The Independent, and more). That would be good news, b… Read More

• Cancer

  Cancer Sequencing Hype And Reality

  2 May, 2018

  This piece in Science says something that needs to be said louder and more publicly. If you live in the US, you’ve surely seen various cancer treatment centers talking about their personalized therapy plans, and especially how they’ll tailor things to your DNA sequence and so on. You would get the impression that we have… Read More

• Cancer

  IDO Appears to Have Wiped Out

  1 May, 2018

  We have the answer to a question posed here earlier this month. That was after the Merck/Incyte failure of a combination of Keytruda and Incyte’s IDO (indole 2,3-dioxygenase) inhibitor. That mechanism was supposed to increase T-cell activity, but the trial showed it to have no effect on Keytruda’s efficacy at all. Earlier IDO trials had… Read More