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.
I’ve never known quite what to make of the “open source pharma” idea. I know that there are a lot of people working on things in this area, and that there’s a lot of interest. But as someone who does drug discovery for a living, I can’t quite see how it can work. And I’m… Read More
You know how most newspaper articles that deal with chemistry show that the writer didn’t know very much about chemistry? Well, it looks as if people know even less about how chemistry is actually taught. Chemjobber has more here. I’ll echo his question: do they really not teach anyone at Emory what a bond is… Read More
Here’s a look from Bayer at their experiences providing vitamin D receptor ligands to the academic community over the last twenty years (which takes the compounds back into their Schering AG origins). Overall, they’ve found that the compounds seem to have helped the various research groups along quite a bit, and have led to a… Read More
Since I’ve mentioned a recent book on academic drug discovery, I also wanted to highlight this article at Nature Biotechnology on university tech transfer offices (TTOs). The authors, mostly from a list of high-profile research universities (Oxford, Stanford, UCSF, University College London, Harvard et al.) and part of the Oxbridge Biotech Ro… Read More
I have a book review out in Nature Chemical Biology of A Practical Guide to Drug Development in Academia. As you’ll see, I liked it, finding it a very useful guide to real-world drug discovery for people who are interested in what they’d need to do to get into it. Here’s a quote that some… Read More
Here’s a good paper from Phil Baran and co-workers in Accounts of Chemical Research on the relationship between industrial and academic research. It’s illustrated with examples from his own work, such as the ingenol synthesis, and with new synthetic methods discovered in collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Eisai, and Sigma- Read More
This article at NEJM is looking at how well clinical trial results are made public, which has been a big topic over the last few years. Let me say up front that the results are quite interesting, and that some news outlets appear to be misreporting them. Since 2007, it’s been required by law that… Read More
Here’s a look at the state of medical research in the US versus other developed countries (open-access article at JAMA). Some things to note from that chart: (1) research funding has been pretty flat the last few years, with the only exception being the stimulus-package burst of cash. (2) The share of the total put… Read More
When you look into the literature on small-molecule agents for really tricky targets, something stands out to medicinal chemists immediately: the structures start to get strange. Examples of this sort of thing are beyond counting, but this recent paper will serve as well as any. It’s from a large multicenter academic team, and proposes severa… Read More
Here’s one to put in the “hubris” file – we’ll have to wait to see whether or not it’s followed by the traditional divine retribution. According to Drug Discovery & Development (note: corrected source), startup Recursion Pharmaceuticals, out of the University of Utah, states that they’re going to devel… Read More
