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 "Chemical Biology"

• Analytical Chemistry

  Down To the Single Cells

  17 April, 2019

  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

• Chemical Biology

  Making Some New Compounds, to Fit Some New Receptors

  12 April, 2019

  Here’s some medicinal chemistry combined with synthetic biology for you. Many people are used to thinking in terms of finding small-molecule probes for various cell targets, and those are valuable things. But what if you want to control a certain population of (for example) ion channels, but there aren’t any compounds that will do the… Read More

• Cancer

  No Pain, and No Worries?

  29 March, 2019

  The FAAH (fatty acid amide hydrolase) enzyme system has provided a number of headlines over the years. FAAH itself is involved in the brain’s endocannabinoid system – it clears neurotransmitters like anandamide – and a number of other biologically important hydroxyethylamide and acyltaurines. So the potential for inhibitors of it… Read More

• Chemical Biology

  Sneaking Proteins Into Cells

  13 March, 2019

  Now here’s a weird and rather startling paper. One of the things that people in this line of work spend a lot of time on is getting things into living cells. Small molecules often slide in, one way or another (although, to be honest, our detailed understanding of how they do that could use some… Read More

• Chemical Biology

  What Those Degraders Are Actually Doing

  12 March, 2019

  Since targeted protein degradation is such a hot topic these days, this paper (which adds to the results obtained by this one) should get some interest. It’s a report of a detailed look at the kinetic behavior of several bifunctional degraders – and there’s a lot of kinetic behavior to look at. That’s because you’re l… Read More

• Chemical Biology

  More Fragment Binding In Cells – Now With Less Confusion

  5 March, 2019

  The Cravatt group (in collaboration with partners from Harvard and Bristol-Myers Squibb) has a paper out on Chemrxiv that’s a followup to a 2017 paper of theirs which (I will freely admit) is one of my favorites. That was on taking fragment-sized compounds (and a slightly higher-MW collection), each labeled with a diazirene (for photoaffinity… Read More

• Biological News

  Targeting microRNAs

  26 February, 2019

  Medicinal chemists spend the vast majority of their time targeting proteins. Enzyme active sites, receptors, allosteric sites, interfacial sites – it’s one protein after another, to the point that you can mentally assume that your compounds are going to be hitting the familiar landscape of backbone amide bonds, pi-interacting tryptophan… Read More

• Biological News

  Reaching Into the Cell

  19 February, 2019

  One would like to be able to reach into a cell and mess around with its functions in real time. Thanks to CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies, we can (more or less selectively) tweak individual genes, to a wide number of interesting effects. What if that gene just disappears? What if it gets expressed even more?… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Vibrating Proteins, Resolved

  13 February, 2019

  Here’s something that many of us don’t tend to think about when we think about enzymes: vibrational energy. But it’s long been thought that anisotropic vibrational energy transfer (VET) plays a role in both enzyme active sites and in things like coupling to allosteric sites. Getting a handle on that, though, has not been easy… Read More

• Biological News

  Quinine’s Target

  22 January, 2019

  Every “history of pharmaceuticals” article ever written probably mentions quinine, and well they should. (I certainly reserved an entry for it while writing my own chemical history book). It’s a classic example of a natural product drug, one that was not known to the classical Mediterranean world but was only appreciated by Europe… Read More