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.
Venetoclax (ABT-199) is an unusual drug. But now there’s some unusually bad (and unexpected) news about it. That’s the structure at right, and medicinal chemists will understand immediately why it’s a bit of an outlier. With a molecular weight of 868, that structure just keeps on going, with a somefeatures that you donR… Read More
A few years ago on this blog, I wrote several times about a small company called Zafgen and their unusual epoxide-based chemical matter (beloranib) that was in development for the rare Prader-Willi syndrome. That’s a genetic disorder that includes, among many other problems, constant hunger (with the complications that you’d expect fro… Read More
There have been some pretty dramatic clinical trial results coming out recently, and unfortunately drama is a variable that can take either a positive or a negative sign in front of it. On the plus side, MacroGenix, a company that not many people had been paying attention to, announced results of a head-to-head trial of… Read More
Here’s a strongly opinionated look at where the “precision medicine” field is these days, and I think that this is just the sort of article that the field (and the journalists covering it) need to see, whether you agree with it or not: In 1999 Francis Collins published a foundational document of precision medicine entitled… Read More
To what should be absolutely no human being’s surprise, another amyloid-antibody trial has failed. Roche announced today that the Phase III work (two 750-patient trials) on crenezumab after an interim analysis showed a strong chance of futility. They’re still going on with a study in familial early-onset disease in Colombia, and they ha… Read More
We have another entry in the “Is Alzheimer’s caused by infectious disease?” drawing, and it’s a good one. A large multicenter team reports that Porphyromonas gingivalis, which is the key pathogen in gingivitis (gum disease) may be the actual causative agent in Alzheimer’s, which is a bold claim indeed. But they have… Read More
Here’s an unusual twist for you. Many readers will be familiar – to their regret, most likely – with the story of T*ring Pharmaceuticals (name redacted slightly in order to not defame a great scientist whose name was tacked on to this outfit for no reason other than advertising). Their first idea was to go… Read More
This one will be good for a wry smile, a roll of the eyes, or perhaps a knowing shiver. The British Medical Journal has published a “Key opinion leaders’ guide to spinning a disappointing clinical trial result”, and many are the times that such a handbook is needed, unfortunately: When key opinion leaders are asked… Read More
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
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
