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 "Clinical Trials"

• Business and Markets

  Worse Than Useless

  6 December, 2018

  Time for another look at AbbVie’s work on Rova-T (an antibody-drug conjugate targeting the tumor antigen DLL3), and for some hard thoughts about what drug development is really like. The last time I wrote about this program, things didn’t look good. Now they look even worse. A Phase III trial of the drug has been… Read More

• Cancer

  PI3K Inhibitors: You’re Doing It Wrong

  16 November, 2018

  Now here’s an interesting connection between cancer and metabolism, with what look to be direct implications for therapy. A large research team (mostly working out of Weill Cornell) reports some new and important details about PI3K inhibitors, a class of kinase inhibitors that has seen a very large amount of development work indeed. I’v… Read More

• Alzheimer's Disease

  Failure Shouldn’t Be Such an Orphan

  15 November, 2018

  The drug industry has  a huge stockpile of results on projects that have not worked. That much is clear – clinical success rates continue at about 10%, on average, so we have a steady stream failures of all kinds, for all reasons. It would be foolish not to learn as much as we could from… Read More

• Alzheimer's Disease

  More on BAN2401, Unfortunately

  25 October, 2018

  If you’re interested in Alzheimer’s clinical trials, and especially in the Biogen/Eisai antibody (BAN2401) that I last wrote about here, today has been a big day. But maybe not a good day. That last post from from July, when the two companies had released data about the BAN2401 trials, and a lot of questions were… Read More

• Biological News

  Gene Editing: Freely You Have Received, Freely Give

  9 October, 2018

  This year has seen significant advances in the search for human gene editing of Mendelian disease. Back in April, a team from three major institutions in Seoul reported in Nature Biotechnology on the use of a recent CRISPR variation that does single-base-pair editing. Their proof-of-concept was the “Himalayan mutation“, an A-to-G switc… Read More

• Cancer

  A Nobel for Immuno-Oncology

  1 October, 2018

  As many had expected, the Nobel prize in medicine/physiology this year recognizes advances in immuno-oncology: James Allison (for CTLA4) and Tasuku Honjo (PD-1). For some years now, that has been a huge, massive, unstoppable wave in cancer research, and I would not want to try to estimate how much time, effort, and money has gone… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Fighting It Out Over Stem Cells

  28 September, 2018

  This is going to sound weird, but remember stem cells? I know that they’re still an active and important area of research and all, but I’m referring more to the period of political enthusiasm about fifteen years ago. Elected officials at the gubernatorial and national level all had positions on stem cell research, and there… Read More

• Academia (vs. Industry)

  Reporting Clinical Trials

  20 September, 2018

  In 2015, a study looked at drug-industry sponsored clinical trials versus those funded by the NIH, and concluded that about 20% of industry trials did not report results when required to do so, while the figure for NIH-sponsored research was about 50% (and even more for trials funded by other institutions). At the time, I… Read More

• Cancer

  A Run of Contrary Results

  19 September, 2018

  From the outside, medical progress looks a lot easier than it really is. Well, I realize that’s true of a lot of things, but it’s especially true in progress against disease, and that’s especially especially true (as I’ve said here before) when you’re talking about dietary influences and what can be learned from them.… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Digging Into the Genetics of Drug Targets

  12 September, 2018

  Rare diseases – remember years ago, back when those were a case of market failure? When companies were reluctant to work on them because the market size was guaranteed to be small and you’d have to charge, like, a hundred thousand or more a year to make the whole idea financially viable? Which wasn’t going… Read More