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.
We now have a complete writeup of the efficacy data from the Oxford/AZ vaccine effort in The Lancet, and I’m glad to see it. There have been a number of questions about this candidate and its effects in the clinic, so the chance to get a closer look is welcome. This is of course the… Read More
This weekend brought some really significant news in the long-running effort to use gene editing to treat human disease. As most readers will have heard, Boston Children’s Hospital and a Vertex/CRISPR effort both published papers in the NEJM addressing sickle-cell anemia and beta-thalassemia. (Update: edit to fix attribution). These diseases… Read More
As of this morning, we have a first look at the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine’s efficacy in clinical trials via press releases from both organizations. The number in the headlines says about 70% efficacy, but there’s more to the story. Here’s the landscape so far: we have results from Pfizer and from Moderna, both of them developing… Read More
I know that it’s been a run of vaccine posts around here, but the numbers just keep on coming. Today we have two more papers to look at, both published in The Lancet. – The first is from the SinoVac inactivated virus effort (the CoronaVac vaccine). In this one, the virus is grown in Vero… Read More
As expected, we have more vaccine news this morning. And the news is good. Moderna reports that their own mRNA candidate is >94% effective (point estimate), with 95 total cases in the trial to date, split 90/5 between the control group and the vaccinated group. 11 of those were severe infections: all 11 in the… Read More
I’ve been meaning to write about what has to be called a regulatory mystery. Eli Lilly obtained an Emergency Use Authorization for its monoclonal antibody (bamlanivimab) against SARS-Cov-2, but (as detailed in this post) the dosage that they applied for was 700mg. Which is one-quarter of the dose that showed any efficacy against the primary… Read More
We have a new paper in the NEJM from the Eli Lilly effort on monoclonal antibodies against the coronavirus. And there’s no reason not to be up front about it: it’s disappointing. This is the BLAZE-1 trial (mentioned in this recent post), which is studying non-hospitalized patients. It was another trial (ACTIV-3) where this antibody… Read More
So here’s an ambitious idea that’s about to get a hearing in human clinical trials. A startup called Shasqi is using click chemistry as a drug delivery method, and they have a new manuscript on the idea here at ChemRxiv. The idea is this: you produce a modified version of a hyaluronate biopolymer, decorated with… Read More
OK, we have some more to think about this morning. The large SOLIDARITY trial from the WHO has reported more interim data on its investigation into repurposed drugs for the coronavirus pandemic. And some of this we already knew, but some of it’s a real surprise. One drug reported on is hydroxychloroquine. This showed no… Read More
The first advice is “Don’t panic”. You will have heard that last night J&J announced that their coronavirus vaccine dosing has been paused while they investigate an adverse event in the trial. And while you never like to hear that, considering the size of their effort, this sort of thing is likely to happen even… Read More
