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.
One minor side effect of the pandemic is that perhaps more people will learn about what drug research and clinical trials can really be like. Today’s example: we have a clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine from Wuhan that has just published on a preprint server. What’s good is that this one is blinded, randomized, and controlled… Read More
Dr. Didier Raoult of Marseilles and his co-workers have published another preprint on clinical results with the chloroquine/azithromycin combination that their earlier work has made famous. And I still don’t know what to think of it. This is going to be a long post on the whole issue, so if you don’t feel like reading… Read More
Everyone’s heard plenty about chloroquine, azithromycin, remdesivir and other front-running ideas for anti-coronovirus therapies. Today I wanted to focus on some compounds that haven’t gotten as much attention but which have been proposed from more than one place as possibilities. Some of these have shown up in the comments to past post… Read More
I wanted to mention this paper, which is one of the more comprehensive ones on the idea of repurposing existing drugs against the coronavirus. It’s a large multicenter team that clearly did a lot of very fast coordination to produce these results. What they’ve done is looked at the complete suite of proteins produced by… Read More
Time to catch up with the latest clinical news in the field. The big story this morning is apparently some real data out of a controlled trial of chloroquine from China. There have been anecdotal reports, but to the best of my knowledge we have seen no actual numbers. These are not exactly from the… Read More
I wrote a post a while back on what I saw as “decontamination theater”: the shots (originally from China) of people fogging buildings and outdoor scenes with what was often described as some sort of disinfectant. As I wrote at the time, I was unaware of any antiviral sanitizing agent that was dispersed in this… Read More
I’ve come to accept that the site is going to be pretty much all-corona-all-the-time during this crisis. I’ll try to do the occasional post on something else, but there’s so much news on the epidemic, so much (nearly involuntary!) interest and, not least, so much complete garbage information out there that I feel that those… Read More
Now that chloroquine is in the news everywhere, I thought it might be interesting to have a closer look at the compound. The first part of this post will be chemistry-heavy, further down we’ll get into the pharmacology and medical uses. Chloroquine’s fame is as an antimalarial drug, and the history of antimalarials starts of… Read More
We’re starting to see some clinical trial data on possible Covid-19 therapies, specifically some of the ones mentioned in this earlier post on small-molecule approaches. First, the bad news (although I have to say it’s not unexpected). A trial of the lopinavir/ritonavir combination has shown no benefit. I say “not unexpected”… Read More
There’s quite a bit of confusion around the ACE proteins and coronavirus infection, and I can see why. The names in this area are pretty confusing, for one thing, and if you’re not familiar with the tangled feedback loops that you get in human biology, it all starts to look like a tangle of wires… Read More
