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.
Hot new technologies! We have waves of them in this business, and everyone talks about them, spends money looking at them, and does deals with small companies who are formed around them. But then reality sets in: only a few of these things march forward into the clinic, and even fewer emerge on the other… Read More
Just how are things organized in a living cell? What’s next to what, in three dimensions? That is, of course, a really hard question to answer, but we’re going to have to be able to answer it in a lot of contexts (and at high resolution) if we’re ever going to understand what’s going on… Read More
An organism is exposed to some new task or stimulus in its environment, and learns a new behavior to deal with it. Does this trait get passed on to its progeny? Of course not. That would be Lamarckianism (or even worse, Lysenkoism), and that’s just not how things work. If you teach your dog a… Read More
You’d think that we would understand the workings of something like the insulin receptor by now, wouldn’t you? I worked in the metabolic disease area for several years, and I can give you the canonical version of its activities as it relates to insulin levels and glucose handling out in the canonical tissues (muscle, adipose). Read More
Many readers will have seen the paper that just came out on a possible mouse-model demonstration of a connection between autism and the gut microbiome. It’s certainly generated a lot of headlines, and its very title guaranteed that it would: “Human Gut Microbiota from Autism Spectrum Disorder Promote Behavioral Symptoms in Mice“.… Read More
Comes now some rather disturbing news in the antibody field. These things are extremely important, both as therapeutics and as research reagents, and developing them for either purpose is no stroll down the garden walk. There are a number of techniques for raising and producing antibodies (see that first link), but they all have their… Read More
Do you know the Ship of Theseus problem? That one was first stated in its canonical form by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives, speaking of the ship that the hero used to return to Athens from Crete after slaying the Minotaur. Here we go: The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned… Read More
A solid, believable animal model of a human disease (preferably in a small animal like a mouse!) is a very important thing to have in a drug discovery project, but they are hard to come by. A mouse is not a human, and neither are the other small organisms that we’d like to use. But… Read More
This is a good brief overview of a topic that’s becoming more important all the time: analysis on the single-cell level. And as the authors mention, it’s partly a case of wanting to do this, and partly a case of there being no other choice. Larger pooled tissue samples just don’t have the level of… Read More
A scientific giant, Sydney Brenner has died at the age of 92. He was present at the beginning of molecular biology – while in the chemistry department at Oxford, he car-pooled with Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, Jack Dunitz and others over to Cambridge to see Watson and Crick’s new model for the structure of DNA… Read More
