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.
Here’s neuroscientist Mark Humphries on the recent release by the Allen Institute of a huge pile of data on visual cortex processing. The “Allen Brain Observatory” details the activity of neurons in the mouse brain in response to a range of different visual cues. It’s broken down by layers of the cortex and by known… Read More
I’d like to help publicize what seems like a very worthwhile effort, funded by the University of Queensland and the Wellcome Trust: the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD). Here’s a writeup on them in Nature – what they’re doing is taking compounds from all sources and screening them against panels of i… Read More
My post the other day on Phil Baran’s public-private funding ideas brought in a lot of comment. As usual, I encourage a look a the comments section if you’re interested in the topic, or any topic that comes up around here – a lot of people who know whereof they speak show up. But I… Read More
If you haven’t seen this speech by Phil Baran, given at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, it’s worth a look. His main theme is what organic chemists can learn from the business model of SpaceX, and he starts out by talking about how grant money for synthetic organic chemistry has… Read More
Reproducibility in the scientific literature has been a big issue for some time now, and it’s not going away any time soon. There are arguments and counterarguments about how much of the literature is not reproducible, how reproducible the attempts to reproduce it are, what the standards should be for such efforts, and how much… Read More
There have been a lot of recent news items about trouble in the chemistry department at UC-Berkeley. (This article at the campus’s Daily Californian a week ago seems to be have kicked off the story, and good for them if it did). The situation is not good, but it doesn’t seem to be as catastrophic… Read More
I see that there’s an investment fund in Europe saying that “Every year, around 30 to 40 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) were actually discovered in European academic labs“. Meanwhile the European Medicines Agency says that “Academia and other public-private partnerships helped to… Read More
A reader sends pointed me to this paper, whose title they found interesting: “Characterization of a Steroid Receptor Coactivator Small Molecule Stimulator that Overstimulates Cancer Cells and Leads to Cell Stress and Death”. An unusual mechanism, for sure – so what is this compound, exactly? You have to go into the Supporting Info… Read More
JAMA has an article out on who funds and conducts clinical trials. It shouldn’t surprise anyone (although it does seem to be news to some headline writers) that industry funds the great majority of them. What does stand out is that the proportion funded by industry is increasing, although that shouldn’t necessarily be news, either. … Read More
Science writer Matt Ridley had an interesting (but somewhat odd) column over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal. Titled “The Myth of Basic Science”, it maintains that “technological innovation has a momentum of its own”, and that basic research doesn’t really drive it. I think that my brain must be about ninety deg… Read More
