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.
Yes indeed, Merck announced last night that the first Phase III trial of their beta-secretase (BACE) inhibitor verubecestat was stopped because of futility. The monitoring committee, after looking over the data so far (the trial’s been running since 2012) concluded that there was no real chance of seeing efficacy. Merck had been enrolling pa… Read More
The news from Eli Lilly is not good – they’re laying off 485 people, according to filings with the state, and it appears to be completely a result of their latest Alzheimer’s clinical failures. The positions are largely in the company’s sales and marketing area. According to that article from FiercePharma, the company had be… Read More
I last wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy in the context of his first company (Axovant). That one went public on the hopes for a retread Alzheimer’s drug to work out in Phase III, and if that sounds a little iffy to you, then join a fairly large club. Alzheimer’s is truly the approach-avoidance conflict writ large: from… Read More
So, name a class of prescription drugs that lots of people have been taking daily over a period of decades: how about statins? From a distance, the story is completely understandable: statins inhibit the enzyme HMG-CoA reductase, which shuts down a key step in cholesterol biosynthesis. That lowers the amount of cholesterol in the body… Read More
Lots of news at both ends of the scale today. At the bad end would be Arrowhead Pharma, who have been exploring therapeutic RNA interference. That’s a hard row to hoe, and nothing illustrates that better than their announcement that they’re dropping three clinical programs, pretty much all the advanced research that they have, because… Read More
There’s an interesting experiment underway at Vanderbilt, where a team from the university is taking a possible Alzheimer’s candidate into clinical trials on their own. Now, you could come up with several headlines for this, along the lines of “Academic researchers in way over their heads”, or “Plucky professors make e… Read More
After years of work and untold amounts of money, Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s antibody, solanezumab, does not work. It does not help Alzheimer’s patients. No matter how many times you run the Phase III trials, or in which patient populations, they do not get better. No matter how many hopeful press articles you might have seen… Read More
Of the discovery of GSK3 (glycogen synthase kinase 3) inhibitors there has been no end. I first came across it as a target it about 1997, and even then, once I started reading the literature, I quickly felt as if I were late to the party. It’s been investigated for diabetes (and other metabolic diseases), Alzheimer’s… Read More
Merck has published new results on their latest Alzheimer’s drug candidate, the beta-secretase inhibitor verubecestat (MK-8931). The paper in Science Translational Medicine is quite interesting, both for what it says and what it doesn’t (or can’t, yet). BACE inhibitors have had quite a time of it over the years. Coming up with a m… Read More
I fear that mentioning the phrase “Big Data” in the first sentence of a blog post will make half the potential readers suddenly remember that they have podiatrist appointments or something. But that’s the only way to approach this article at Wired. After all, the title is “The Cure For Cancer is Data – Mountains of… Read More
