Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine.
Here’s a question that I’m not sure if there’s a general answer to: if you’re putting together a drug discovery portfolio, what percentage of the projects should be new ones, and how many should be some form of follow-up? I say that there may not be a general answer because every place I’ve worked has… Read More
Robert Plenge has an excellent post here, drawing on this recent paper from authors at Stanford. It’s on the idea of polygenic traits and disease, a very worthwhile subject considering what’s going on in the drug industry these days. I say that because I’ve been making the joke, for some time now, that if you were… Read More
I’ve been meaning to link to this article by Frank David at Endpoints, on “leaner and meaner” pharma organizations. For many years now, the story has been about how drug companies are shedding staff, but David says that more recently, that hasn’t been the whole story: From 2011 to 2015, employee numbers actually increased at… Read More
Never say never. Screening natural product extracts for new antibiotics has been a diminishing-returns exercise for quite a while now, which is too bad, since basically every single important antibiotic class came via that route originally. Bacteria compete with each other (as do plenty of other organisms), and seeing what they’ve come up wit… Read More
OK, let’s talk about a breast cancer target, estrogen receptor-beta. It’s been the subject of a great deal of research over the years, but its exact actions have proven difficult to work out. One of the problems has been that there are a number of different antibodies available to locate it in tissue, but they… Read More
This story by Damien Garde at Stat is well worth a look. It goes into a question that people in biopharma have been asking themselves for some years now: when does China move from a contractor to a competitor? This was brought home by the recent results at the ASCO meeting from Nanjing Legend, who… Read More
Here are some data to file under “Drugs do things that we don’t expect”. The SGLT-2 inhibitors are a class of diabetes medications that work by inhibiting the sodium/glucose transporter 2 protein in the kidneys. That keeps glucose from being reabsorbed there; instead, more of it is removed in the urine, and that lowers circulating… Read More
There’s an interesting fight going on inside Mylan Pharmaceuticals. They, of course, are the longtime generic drug maker whose EpiPen prices have (understandably) made them a lightning rod for complaints about drug pricing in general. This New York Times article will give you the flavor of the company, and most unappetizing it is: To understa… Read More
Here’s a family of proteins that people don’t encounter all that often, but they illustrate how odd and complicated human biology gets to be. The TRP (transient receptor potential) ion channels are a large family (28 members) divided into several groups. Many of them (although not all of them) are involved in sending sensory informati… Read More
Let’s put this one under the “This is why you run clinical trials” heading. A number of companies have looked at inhibitors of indoleamine 2,3 dioxygenase (IDO) over the last few years. The enzyme turns tryptophan into kynurenine, a pathway which (among other things) regulates immune function. Evidence has accumulated that many… Read More
