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.
Several days after making some headlines with a press release about the data, the Novavax vaccine effort has published on Medrxiv. The is the first look at human data we have at an approach using recombinant coronavirus proteins (plus an adjuvant, in this case a proprietary saponin natural product). The protein itself is produced in… Read More
I’m very glad to see some data emerging on the monoclonal antibody therapies that have been in the works. Regeneron and Eli Lilly/Abcellera are two of the front-runners in this field, which could pick up some very much needed slack while the many vaccine trials are going on. And late yesterday a preprint emerged from… Read More
Many people have been wondering what’s going on with the announcement by the Trump administration that Kodak has been contracted to produce pharmaceutical APIs here in the US. Let’s line up some of the public statements about all this first, and then take a closer look. Here’s the press release from Kodak after signing a “L… Read More
We’ve got a lot of longstanding technical difficulties in the drug development business – things that we’d really like to be able to do, but can’t quite manage to find any general solutions to. Measuring drug concentrations inside cells (or parts of cells), that’s one. Predicting human toxicology for a new compound is… Read More
We have a sudden influx over the last few days of preclinical rhesus challenge studies with various coronavirus vaccines, and it’s only natural to try to compare them. I have worked up a table with all four of the current results and the previously reported SinoVac inactivated virus vaccine, whose rhesus challenge numbers were officially… Read More
As everyone knows, there have been a lot of attempts to repurpose existing therapies for the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve covered several of these along the way, but it’s time for some updates. The work that’s been going on not only adds to our knowledge about treatment for infected patients, but it should – ideally – Read More
In a bit of a surprise move, Pfizer and their partner BioNTech announced yesterday that they were moving their BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine candidate forward into Phase II/III trials. The surprise was because all the publications from this effort so far had been on another one of their four candidates, BNT162b1. Fans keeping score at home will know… Read More
Headlines appeared last night about Moderna losing a patent case that affects its coronavirus vaccine work. I know from long experience on this blog that any discussion of patent and IP issues has an effect on my readership traffic numbers that looks like I’m paying folks not to click on my links that day, but… Read More
It’s not surprising that there have been many intersections of artificial intelligence and machine learning with the current coronavirus epidemic. AI and ML are very hot topics indeed, not least because they hold out the promise of sudden insights that would be hard to obtain by normal means. Sounds like something we’re in need of… Read More
Let’s catch on some non-coronavirus research today with an interesting approach against a very bad disease, metastatic colon cancer. This new paper (from groups at Virginia Tech and Wake Forest) adds to our understanding of something that’s been noticed for some time: colon cancer tissue is often infected with Fusobacterium nucleatum. T… Read More
