Travel
I’m traveling for the next couple of days, so regular blog posting will resume on Monday. See everyone then!
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.
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Blog Housekeeping
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Biological News
Antibody Design, Publicly Challenged
Comes now some rather disturbing news in the antibody field. These things are extremely important, both as therapeutics and as research reagents, and developing them for either purpose is no stroll down the garden walk. There are a number of techniques for raising and producing antibodies (see that first link), but they all have their… -
Life in the Drug Labs
The Killer Experiment
Bruce Booth has some thoughts here on a recent Harvard Business Review piece on startups, but don’t let the fact that it’s from HBR put you off from taking a look. The original article is focused on innovation in general, but Booth ties it more directly to biopharma culture, and his advice certainly looks sound… -
Analytical Chemistry
Absolute Configuration With Electrons
When I first wrote about small-molecule structures obtained by microED (electron diffraction), I wondered if there were some way to get absolute stereochemistry out of the data (as you can with X-ray diffraction under the right conditions). Several groups have been working on just that problem, and this new paper now shows that it can… -
Chemical Biology
Myristoylation Probes, Rethought
The need for good chemical probes continues, and (sadly) so does the use of crappy ones. That’s what I took away from this recent paper from a multicenter team out of London. They’re looking at commonly used probes for inhibition of N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) enzymes, and it’s one of those good-news/bad-news situations. N-myrist… -
Biological News
What’s Artificial Life, Anyway?
Do you know the Ship of Theseus problem? That one was first stated in its canonical form by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives, speaking of the ship that the hero used to return to Athens from Crete after slaying the Minotaur. Here we go: The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned… -
Aging and Lifespan
VCAM1 As a Player in the Aging Brain
Possible intervention targets for age-related degeneration are always welcome, particularly when they come bearing experimental evidence, and even more so when they relate to the central nervous system. That’s the case with this new paper, from a multicenter team led out of Stanford. Interestingly, this also ties in with the well-publicized … -
In Silico
An Intro to Deep Learning
I wanted to mention a timely new book, Deep Learning for the Life Sciences, that I’ve received a copy of. It’s by Bharath Ramsundar at Computable, Peter Eastman at Stanford, Pat Walters at Relay, and Vijay Pande at Andreessen Horowitz, and I’ve been using it to shore up my knowledge in this area. From what… -
Chemical News
The Downside of Chemistry Automation
Automation in chemistry (especially industrial chemistry) is so pervasive that we hardly even notice it any more. (I have a whole talk that I give that’s partly on that very subject). But what is automation for? That’s the subject of this short piece in ACS Med. Chem. Letters by Jeffrey Pan of AbbVie. The answer… -
Pharmacokinetics
There Is No “Depression Gene”
I wrote a couple of years ago about the long-running study of mutations in a serotonin transporter gene. Over the years, polymorphism in the gene have been correlated with all sorts of human behavior and psychiatry, in keeping with the importance of serotonin signaling in human cognition. Depression, anxiety, that whole end of human behavior…