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

  Real Progress in Parkinson’s

  2 November, 2018

  There have been some potentially significant developments in Parkinson’s disease, which is a good thing to be able to report. As populations age around the world, PD has been on its way up, but therapies for it have not been, despite a good deal of work in the field. But it looks like some clues… Read More

• Biological News

  Rewiring Bacteria

  22 October, 2018

  Earth is basically a bacteria planet, despite humankind’s naked-eye-level profile. They’ve been here unfathomably longer than we have, they live in plenty of places where we can’t survive, and their biomass far outranks ours. This paper will show you just how adaptable the little creatures are. Wild-type E. coli (like many other… Read More

• Biological News

  Sunlight And the Brain

  12 October, 2018

  One of the impressive things about biochemistry and cell biology is how it can produce physical correlates to things that we know and experience, but have no detailed explanation for. There’s a really interesting example out in Cell that has to do with the effects of sunlight on mood and learning. Those effects are real, but… Read More

• Biological News

  Gene Editing: Freely You Have Received, Freely Give

  9 October, 2018

  This year has seen significant advances in the search for human gene editing of Mendelian disease. Back in April, a team from three major institutions in Seoul reported in Nature Biotechnology on the use of a recent CRISPR variation that does single-base-pair editing. Their proof-of-concept was the “Himalayan mutation“, an A-to-G switc… Read More

• Biological News

  Soluble Proteins – And Those Other Ones

  8 October, 2018

  Modifying proteins with unnatural amino acids is a wide field with a lot of interesting research areas. Nature has provided us with twenty-odd amino acids (counting some rare ones), but there’s no reason that we have to play the hand that we’re dealt. Modifications of protein transcription and translation machinery have increasingly all… Read More

• Biological News

  The Chemistry Nobels, 2018

  3 October, 2018

  The 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to Frances Arnold (for directed evolution of enzymes) and to George Smith and Gregory Winter for phage display. These are worthy discoveries, techniques that have gone on to be used for a huge variety of work ranging from blue-sky research to marketed drugs, and the Nobel committee… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Sitting There For Five Hundred Million Years

  21 September, 2018

  This paper is really a tour de force of analytical chemistry, because it does something that I didn’t think was possible. The team is looking at a rather ancient creature, Dickinsonia. In fact, you could argue that it’s the ancient creature, since it’s one of the Ediacaran organisms that are part of the first explosion… Read More

• Biological News

  Switching On Innate Immunity

  11 September, 2018

  Cells couldn’t have a hope of working if they weren’t tightly spatially organized. The nucleus vs. the cytosol (and the cell membrane itself) are the two most obvious partitions, and then you have specialized organelles like the mitochondria, et very much cetera, dividing things further. Life itself is organized around things being diff… Read More

• Biological News

  Cancer Cells Are Even Worse Than We Thought

  29 August, 2018

  There are a lot of cancer cell lines out there, and many of them get used a lot, too. It’s not surprising, in a way, because these are cells that have already (and unfortunately) proven themselves to be robust and fast-growing, so many of these lines tend to take to cell culture conditions pretty well. Read More

• Biological News

  GPCRs: Peeling The Onion Some More

  20 August, 2018

  I like to say that when I was first working on G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) as drug targets, that after I while I thought I really understood a lot of what was going on. But that was the peak. Further experience eroded that confidence, and even though I’ve learned a lot more about them over… Read More