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.
This is a rather eerie result. Two researchers at Stanford report that the often-used model system of Xenopus frog eggs have self-organizing properties. Extracts from homogenized eggs had already been known to be more functional than one might have predicted (the paper has a number of references to such studies), but this paper finds that… Read More
There are a lot of things in human medicine that make sense broadly, but not in detail. We understand why a thing could happen, but not exactly how it happens. A case in point in alcoholic liver disease. It makes perfect sense that longterm alcohol abuse would damage the liver – it’s the front line… Read More
All of us in the business talk about the blood-brain barrier, but. . .no, I’m not going to end this sentence with “. . .none of us do anything about it”, because how it should end is “very few of us really stop to think about what it is”. What makes this (and similar structures) Read More
Catalytically active proteins come in many varieties, and you can classify them in many ways. When you look closely at their structures, one such scheme might be the “solid” ones versus the “delicately balanced” ones. In the first category would be things like carbonic anhydrase or acetylcholinesterase: they do their jobs mo… Read More
Here’s another for the “things we just didn’t realize” file. This article is a nice look at “miniproteins” (also known as micropeptides), small but extremely important species that we’ve mostly missed out on due to both our equipment and our own biases in looking at the data. Other recent overviews are here… Read More
You know, we’re all mutants. No, not just those of us reading (or writing!) this web site, I mean all of us. We all have regions of our genome that are highly variable, of course – the sequences (often based on number of repeat markers) that are used in forensic DNA analysis or the mitochondrial… Read More
With all the work going into targeted protein degradation now (recent review), we’re discovering a lot of things about it that weren’t apparent at first. To pick an obvious one, these things have several steps in their mechanism (binding to the target protein, binding to a ubiquitin ligase to form a ternary complex, ubiquitination of… Read More
So we have the first prize of the 2019 Nobel season, Medicine/Physiology for William Kaelin Jr. (Dana-Farber), Peter Ratcliffe (Oxford), and Gregg Semenza (Johns Hopkins), for their work in cellular adaptation to oxygen levels. This was not one of the outcomes that was in the top of the betting range, but it sure wasn’t in the… Read More
I’ve highlighted several articles here over the years that cast doubt (to say the least) on the popular belief that Antioxidants Are Always Good For You. These other views do not seem to have penetrated the public consciousness yet, though, to judge by the way that foods and supplements are advertised. Today brings another example… Read More
Layer upon layer! That’s what cell biology provides you with – just when you think you understand some area of it, things turn out to be more complex. I’m going on in this mode after looking over this new preprint from the Bertozzi lab at Stanford, which uncovers a new class of biomolecules that no… Read More
