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.
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
The need for good chemical probes continues, and (sadly) so does the use of crappy ones. That’s what I took away from this recent paper from a multicenter team out of London. They’re looking at commonly used probes for inhibition of N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) enzymes, and it’s one of those good-news/bad-news situations. N-myrist… Read More
The number of stories and journal articles about how CRISPR DNA-editing technology works, has worked, and is planned to work are beyond counting. How about an article about how to stop it in its tracks? That’s this one, just published in Cell from a multicenter team in Cambridge and New York. It describes a screening… Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
