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.
We now have a complete writeup of the efficacy data from the Oxford/AZ vaccine effort in The Lancet, and I’m glad to see it. There have been a number of questions about this candidate and its effects in the clinic, so the chance to get a closer look is welcome. This is of course the… Read More
Pfizer and BioNTech have a date on Thursday in front of an FDA advisory committee to review their vaccine data, and the briefing document is available for all to read (here’s the FDA’s own document as well). It’s very interesting stuff, and far more information than we’ve had so far. First off, safety. There continue… Read More
This weekend brought some really significant news in the long-running effort to use gene editing to treat human disease. As most readers will have heard, Boston Children’s Hospital and a Vertex/CRISPR effort both published papers in the NEJM addressing sickle-cell anemia and beta-thalassemia. (Update: edit to fix attribution). These diseases… Read More
We’re in the beginning of the vaccine endgame now: regulatory approval and actual distribution/rollout into the population. The data for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines continue to look good (here’s a new report on the longevity of immune response after the Moderna one), with the J&J and Novavax efforts still to report. The… Read More
We seem to be heading for a world with multiple coronavirus vaccines in it, and right off, I have to say that that this is a very good situation. But it has its complications, and one that I know many people have been wondering about is, what if you get two different ones? That could… Read More
I’ve had a lot of people ask me about yesterday’s protein folding news as it relates to drug discovery. And while I did a post on that last year, I thought it might be useful to briefly lay out the real problems with drug discovery, as I see them. Most folks in drug discovery will… Read More
Every two years there’s a big challenge competition in predicting protein folding. That is. . .well, a hard problem. Protein chains have (in theory) an incomprehensibly large number of possible folded states, but many actual proteins just manage to arrange themselves properly either alone or with a few judicious bumps from chaperones. It̵… Read More
So I’ll be taking time off until probably Monday, unless we get any big news. Thanksgiving season is here, and although we don’t have as big a crowd as usual here (of course), I will soon head into the kitchen to make the same chocolate pecan pie I do every year. Every so often someone… Read More
As of this morning, we have a first look at the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine’s efficacy in clinical trials via press releases from both organizations. The number in the headlines says about 70% efficacy, but there’s more to the story. Here’s the landscape so far: we have results from Pfizer and from Moderna, both of them developing… Read More
I know that it’s been a run of vaccine posts around here, but the numbers just keep on coming. Today we have two more papers to look at, both published in The Lancet. – The first is from the SinoVac inactivated virus effort (the CoronaVac vaccine). In this one, the virus is grown in Vero… Read More
