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.
Phosphorylation is a prime example of a reaction that’s hugely important in biochemistry that organic synthesis struggles with terribly (as opposed to the efficiency and finesse with which it’s handled in by enzymatic processes). The methods used to attach phosphate esters in the flask are frankly pretty crude (all the way up, or down,… Read More
OK, we’re going to get a bit esoteric this morning. There are all kinds of things going on in the world, but I’m going to seek refuge for a little bit in abstraction, and if that’s your sort of thing, then let’s lift off. This is broadly on the hot topic of machine learning, which… Read More
Let’s talk Sarepta. And FDA approval, because you can’t bring up that company without immediately starting a regulatory affairs argument. I was not happy when their initial exon-skipping therapy (Exondys, eteplirsen) for Duchenne muscular dystrophy was approved in 2016, because I thought that the efficacy data were simply not strong eno… Read More
This is a rather eerie result. Two researchers at Stanford report that the often-used model system of Xenopus frog eggs have self-organizing properties. Extracts from homogenized eggs had already been known to be more functional than one might have predicted (the paper has a number of references to such studies), but this paper finds that… Read More
As someone who used a lot of carbohydrates as chiral pool starting materials in grad school, I regard this paper as the next thing to witchcraft. Even folks without carbohydrate experience appreciate readily that there are sugars that you hear about all the time (such as glucose, mannose, and galactose) and some that you hardly… Read More
Figuring out an unusual natural product’s activity can be a difficult but rewarding exercise. Deep evolutionary time has provided us with a bizarre range of chemical structures that are presumably not being synthesized by organisms for the sheer fun of it – these things are acting as signaling molecules, antifeedants, poisons for the co… Read More
It’s time to talk about a new venture called EQRx. This has made quite a splash in the last few days at the JP Morgan investor conference, and it’s been launched by Alexis Borisy (involved with founding and/or helping run CombinatoRx, Foundation, Blueprint, WarpDrive Bio, Editas, Relay and others) with the aim of generating cheaper… Read More
Science has an interesting report on the publication of clinical trial results. Some readers will recall similar efforts from 2015 and 2017/2018 in the US and Europe; this is actually a follow-up by one of the same US authors. It should actually be a dull report, because the requirements for such disclosure are clear. The rules… Read More
A few years back here on this site when I would write about synthetic photochemical methods, the reaction in the comments section was, well, mixed. There would be interest, but there was always a strain of “Bunch of academic publications that will never amount to anything in the real world” as well. The amount of… Read More
I mentioned cancer incidence versus cancer mortality the other day, and I wanted to highlight this NEJM paper, which is a recent and comprehensive look at the topic. You can see several different effects in the data. Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for example, has shown a pretty steady incidence rate over the past 40 years, but steadily… Read More
