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.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Biological News"

• Biological News

  Bacteria and Depression: Something to Test

  17 January, 2019

  Microbiome, microbiome – you haven’t been able to turn around in this business the last few years without hitting some sort of story about the microbiome. It’s easy to roll your eyes and decide that it’s all hype, but that’s the thing: it really is important. It can’t be dismissed just because we don’t unde… Read More

• Biological News

  Room For Improvement

  8 January, 2019

  How much can we improve on Nature? Fixing defective proteins and pathways is one thing, but in those cases we’re trying to get back to what the function should be (and what it is in healthy organisms). But what about “better than healthy”? That’s a tricky area to enter, because (for one thing) billions of… Read More

• Biological News

  We Have Given People Amyloid Disease

  17 December, 2018

  Unfortunately, it’s time to talk transmissible protein pathology again. That’s the unnerving idea that misfolded proteins can, under some conditions, act as infectious agents (prions are the most famous examples and the most widely-used name for these). I wrote in 2015 about a particularly alarming possibility. It’s known that up… Read More

• Biological News

  Right Side, Left Side

  13 December, 2018

  I wrote here about chirality, on several levels, finishing up with some speculations on how we know our left hands from our right and why. As mentioned in that post, that’s one of those questions that can sound stupid and/or trivial until you start to think about it, and as the comments section proved, things… Read More

• Biological News

  Tumor-Specific Antigens From Way Out There

  11 December, 2018

  The pileup in immuno-oncology is already the stuff of legend: it’s difficult to even count the number of therapies, combinations, and clinical trials that are underway or in development. And that’s for good reason, of course – the promise here is huge, the field is wide open, and there are vast tracts of things that… Read More

• Alzheimer's Disease

  The Genomics of Neurons. And Alzheimer’s. And Everything Else.

  29 November, 2018

  The brain is a complicated organ. Let’s start there. It’s complicated at every level that you care to examine, and if you get down to the genomic sequences of individual neurons, it’s worse than ever. The sheer variety of neurons and other cell types is quite extreme, and a lot of work over the years… Read More

• Biological News

  After Such Knowledge

  28 November, 2018

  So now we know more about the CRISPR human baby story. And it’s even worse than it looked. Let me recommend this report from Sharon Begley at Stat, from the International Human Genome Summit in Hong Kong, but it’s not going to make you happy to read it. It turns out that He Jiankui devoted quite… Read More

• Biological News

  Born CRISPRed. Now What?

  27 November, 2018

  Are there CRISPR-modified human babies now or not? I was waiting to write about this story in hope that it might get a little more clear, but so far that doesn’t seem to be happening. So here we go. What we know so far is that He Jiankui, a researcher from Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Disorder and Order

  19 November, 2018

  An interesting feature of many proteins is a disordered region down at the carboxy end. The reason for this feature has been obscure: if there’s part of the protein that just spends its days flailing around uselessly, why go to the trouble of translating it? Many of these tails certainly seem to have no defined structural… Read More

• Biological News

  Engineering Biology, For Real?

  12 November, 2018

  Any article titled “How to Engineer Biology” is going to get a look from me – and when I’m referenced in the opening paragraphs, especially so. This is a piece by Vijay Pande in Scientific American, and I get called out for my naming of the “Andy Grove Fallacy” (found in this post and the… Read More