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 been meaning to write about this paper (open access) on some problems with chemical probes, and now’s a good time. There was a well-known article a few years ago about “The Promise and Peril of Chemical Probes”, and this is a deliberate follow-up, starting with its title. Even if you don’t give much of… Read More
I’m really glad to see this Perspective article in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, not least because it hits on a theme that I emphasize whenever I get a chance to speak to graduate student chemistry audiences. The author, Bart Roman, is pointing out that (1) biologics are relentlessly expanding their role in the landscape… Read More
There are a lot of slick ideas in molecular and chemical biology that depend on immobilizing proteins or small molecules onto solid supports. Consider affinity chromatography: if you can tether a “bait” onto some solid matrix, you can then flow all sorts of mixtures over it (gorp from freshly lysed cells, for example) and let… Read More
This is a nice chemical biology paper that hits on a hot topic of the day: the uptake and function of mRNA when administered to cells. You can always look for downstream effects to show that you achieved both those goals, but it would be very useful to get images of this process in real… Read More
Let’s put this one in the category of “more things that we didn’t know about human biology”. We’ve known for some time now about ribozymes – catalytic enzyme-like structures made out of RNA instead of proteins. But they’ve been studied more in lower organisms overall. We know that the hammerhead ribozymes a… Read More
I really enjoyed this new paper on ChemRxiv, a Munich/Michigan/Berkeley collaboration on reactive covalent groups and their profile across different proteins. There have been a number of papers addressing this subject before, but this one is the most comprehensive one I’ve ever seen, and it’s a valuable resource. Most of the covalent… Read More
Let’s take a one-day break from the coronavirus, but fear not, I will not be forsaking immunology. We’ll take a look at an interesting therapeutic idea involving T-cells and how it’s going. For some years now, Amgen has been working on a technology called “BiTE“, which stands for “bispecific T-cell engager“ Read More
Writing the other day about the lipid formulations used in the current mRNA vaccines makes me want to highlight something else that I hit on from time to time around here. When you learn in school about the major classes of biomolecules, you hear about proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. That’s a reasonable classification… Read More
Here’s a new preprint that goes a long way to telling us what we need to know about coronavirus antibodies and Spike protein mutations. It’s from Jesse Bloom’s group at the Fred Hutchinson center in Seattle, and it’s another one of those experiments that you could only do with modern molecular biology (and modern bioinformat… Read More
Drug discovery folks spend a good amount of time and effort dealing with cell membranes. Our drug candidates stick to them, get imbedded in them, might have to slip through them to get to their target proteins, or may target proteins that are localized in them, can get actively transported through them or actively pumped… Read More
