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.
News came yesterday from the Recovery trial effort in the UK that they had seen positive results from dexamethasone treatment in severely ill COVID-19 patients (news article from Science here). This set off a number of headlines that everyone has since been trying to deal with, unfortunately, so I thought I should try to do… Read More
With all of my posts here about vaccines and antibodies, it’s only fair that I spend some time talking about the potential toxicology problems with both of those. I remain optimistic about both categories, but it’s for sure that not all the candidates being advanced are going to make it through. So what sorts of… Read More
Since I did a monoclonal antibody update in the last post, here’s one on the vaccine front, where there is a lot of news – and where there are a lot of issues coming up similar to the ones with the antibodies as well. The last vaccine update post was here. What we’re seeing now… Read More
There’s a lot of interesting antibody news to catch up on, from the early science to clinical trials. A previous post on this subject is here, with links to earlier background explanations, if you would like to catch up on the area. Here, for example, is a report from a large multi-center team in China characterizing… Read More
The recent implosion of the Surgisphere data papers has been big news. It included one that purported to show no benefit (and actual harm) from hydroxychloroquine treatment, and even more harm when combined with azithromycin – but since the authors have been unable to back up the raw data on this, the paper cannot be… Read More
Let’s circle back to remdesivir. We already have the results of the remdesivir Phase II trial that led to its Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA. But now come the first Phase III results, and it’s safe to say that they’re not making anyone happier. The news isn’t bad, but you can’t say it’s particularly… Read More
This morning brought news from Moderna of the very first human results from trials of their closely-watched mRNA vaccine candidate (mRNA-1273) against the coronavirus. Here’s Stat on the news, and here’s Endpts – the results can be summed up pretty quickly, because it’s all just at the press-release level to start with. The… Read More
It’s been some days since I posted on the hydroxychloroquine situation versus the coronavirus epidemic, but I have been getting plenty of inquiries. So let’s have a look at what’s been going on! Several people have pointed out this new preprint, a retrospective look at 568 patients in Wuhan. Update: there is something odd about… Read More
Since we’ve been dealing with a lot of clinical trial data around here, I thought I would field a question from my email that might get to some things that others are thinking about as well. Here (with permission of its sender) is the idea: . . .it does seem, from the outside, like most… Read More
We’ve had several releases of remdesivir data, and this was not exactly one of those controlled-release formulations. No, this was more in the “chaotic mess” category, with news items coming from several sources with partial information. I decided not to blog on it until the loud banging noises stopped, and I’m glad I did, s… Read More
