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.
Since I mentioned retrotransposons and accumulated retroviral genomic litter in yesterday’s post, I’ll get a bit philosophical about that today. I’ve had a couple of interactions with people who read about all this and didn’t realize what state our genomes are in, and they were struck by all this. As they should be! It reall… Read More
I’ve had several requests for comment on this recent PNAS paper, which talks about integration of SARS-CoV-2 sequences into the DNA of human cells. I’m glad to do it, but right off I have to note that a lot of the attention that it’s getting seems (sadly) to be coming from anti-vaccine activists, who are… Read More
The announcement by the Biden administration about waiving IP rights to the coronavirus vaccines obviously calls for some comment. Keep in mind that I have been doing research in the pharma industry for over 30 years now, so my viewpoint is obviously going to be affected by that, for better and for worse. With that… Read More
I’ve been getting a lot of questions in the last few days about several Spike-protein-related (and vaccine-related) topics, so I thought this would be a good time to go into them. There’s been a recent report about the vascular effects of the Spike protein alone (not coronavirus infection per se), and another presentation on similar… Read More
Engineering immune system cells to do what we’d like them to do is one of the big areas of medical research these days, and this new paper could be a real advance in the area. A team out of UCSF with several collaborators reports on a new way around one of the big problems in… Read More
In the last post, I mentioned the Twitter response to the Brazilian rejection of the Gamaleya vaccine. I believe that the official blue-check-marked “Sputnik V” Twitter account is run by the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the sovereign-wealth part of the Russian state that is in charge of rolling out the vaccine to different countries. Read More
We have two pieces of news about the Gamaleya Institute’s “Sputnik-V” vaccine today. Neither of them are going to be enjoyable to go into. First off, many may have heard that the Brazilian regulatory authorities had a hearing yesterday to see if this vaccine would be approved for use there. They have turned it down… Read More
One of the themes of chemistry over the last few decades has been the ability to pay attention to increasingly fine-grained details. We have new instruments that measure smaller and smaller samples and in shorter slices of time, and we’re seeing that the world that we’ve been used to is just an averaged-out look at… Read More
Excellent news today: we have word of the most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered. A year-long trial in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering. This is a collaboration between the University of… Read More
Lots of work going on today, so let me just send the readership to this excellent article about Novavax, by Jason Mast at Endpoints. That vaccine has moved into even more prominence lately with the recent adenovirus vaccine events, and it seems clear that it could be a big part of getting the world vaccinated. Read More
