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 written several times here about phase-separated condensates in cells, but now comes a rarity: a paper with some evidence for a therapeutic application. Everyone in the field has been thinking along such lines, naturally, but this is the first small-molecule screen that I’ve seen that tries to tie modifying condensate behavior in t… Read More
Here’s a new look at the various ways that small molecules can affect a well-known drug target (the estrogen receptor) and it shows us that we’re all going to have to look at these things more carefully than we do. Now, to be fair, the ER is already fairly complicated, because it’s a nuclear receptor. Read More
This is a pretty interesting paper on several levels. It sheds light on Mucin I kidney disease (MKD), on protein degradation pathways (a hot topic these days, as those in the industry well know), and it also provides a small molecule lead compound. It’s a large multicenter team, starting off with the Broad Institute, but… Read More
I wrote here about a new company (Homology Medicine) that claimed to have a viral method for gene editing that did not involve any sort of double-strand DNA breaking enzyme (as you need during the CRISPR, TALENs, or zinc-finger nuclease methods). That’s a pretty interesting claim, because double-strand breaks (DSBs) are powerful but can be… Read More
I’ve written here about phase-separated condensates inside cells, and the publications on these continue to show up all over the literature. I found this recent one in Science to be particularly interesting, on several levels. One thing the condensate idea has given a framework to is the variety of small cellular structures that have been… Read More
The Wall Street Journal published a provocative article the other day, entitled “Don’t Understand Moronic Bromides?” about the proliferation over the years of acronyms in science.(Note the old-fashioned usage of “bromide” derived from the early sleeping pills). And while it’s a cranky piece, it’s not wrong. Read More
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
