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.
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
One of the ways in which this pandemic will be looked back on as a pivot point will (almost certainly) be in the use of mRNA vaccines. It seems clear at this point that these have come through spectacularly against the coronavirus: every new study of their effects in the broad population just adds to… Read More
I enjoyed this post by Bruce Booth on the biopharma funding landscape. But I think we would all agree that. . .well, it’s been weird the last few years. This has been a long, long boom in the amount of money that’s flowed into this sector, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like… Read More
One of specialties of Phil Baran’s group at Scripps the last few years has been electrosynthesis, which has a traditional hmm-interesting-turn-the-page reputation among most synthetic chemists that they’re trying to change. Photochemistry was in roughly the same category at one time, and has become much more mainstream (although it alwa… Read More
I last wrote about the small-molecule antiviral molnupiravir here, and we finally have more information from Merck and Ridgeback about its effects in clinical trials. An interim analysis of the Phase II data from trials in both outpatients and in hospitalized coronavirus patients has been completed, and the news is. . .mixed. In the outpatient… Read More
So what’s the side effect that caused the J&J vaccine pause? Blood clotting – but not the usual kind. This appears to be the same (or very similar) to the problem seem with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe, and both are very similar to a known syndrome called heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. That involves unusual binding to… Read More
Next up on the vaccine news front are some concerns about efficacy. In a very surprising statement, Gao Fu (the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention) said at a conference in Chengdu over the weekend that that the protection figures of the Chinese vaccines are “not high”. He called for research… Read More
Update: the FDA has now paused use of the J&J vaccine due to 6 incidents of what appears to be VITT. We have a lot of vaccine news to catch up on! First up is the latest on the possible clotting side effects seen with Oxford/AstraZeneca. This is looking more and more likely to be… Read More
The New York Times has a good story on the problems at the Emergent vaccine plant in Baltimore, following up on this one. They’ve uncovered a report from last summer that warned that the facility had quality control problems: A copy of the official’s assessment, obtained by The New York Times, cited “key risks” in… Read More
