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 "Drug Development"

• Business and Markets

  Zafgen: Will There Be a Third Act?

  14 March, 2019

  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

• Drug Assays

  Experiences With Phenotypic Screening?

  7 March, 2019

  Very little blogging time today, but I wanted to throw a question out to the readership instead. I’m at the Keystone conference on Phenotypic Drug Discovery, so here’s a relevant topic: what are your own experiences with phenotypic screening? Background for those outside the field: broadly speaking, you can sneak up on a drug by… Read More

• Business and Markets

  Institutional Memory

  4 March, 2019

  This is a topic that came up in the comments section of a post last week, but it’s important enough that I wanted to give it some exposure here on the front page. It was a question from someone outside the industry, who asked about how companies can retain “institutional memory”, what with all the… Read More

• Business and Markets

  The Clinic Giveth And Most Definitely Taketh Away

  7 February, 2019

  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

• Academia (vs. Industry)

  Targets Versus Drugs

  5 February, 2019

  There was a comment on the blog the other day about how there are people in academia who feel that the discovery of a new target or pathway is basically finding a new drug, and that the rest is “technicalities”. I’ve encountered that view of the world before (Donald Light/Rebecca Warburton, Marcia Angell, and similarly Arnold… Read More

• Drug Development

  2018 Drug Approvals: A Closer Look

  4 February, 2019

  Let’s have a look at the recent new drug approvals. 2018 was quite a year, by the numbers. C&E News has a comprehensive roundup: 59 approvals (versus 46 in 2017, which was already a record by itself), and about two-thirds of those small molecules. There are some very interesting molecules in the list, and I… Read More

• Academia (vs. Industry)

  Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Where Drugs Come From

  1 February, 2019

  There have been several hearings in Washington on the drug industry and drug prices, and there are going to be more. Drug pricing is a large and messy issue, for sure, and all I’ll say about it today is to ask everyone to read Jack Scannell on it before expressing an opinion. I’m not going… Read More

• Chemical News

  Defending Drug Synthesis

  29 January, 2019

  This article from Science is a good look at the scientific state of organic synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. It covers a range of topics which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog as well: synthetic advances such as late-stage functionalization, new bond-forming techniques (photoredox chemistry in particular), the intersection… Read More

• Business and Markets

  Nivien’s Shot

  15 January, 2019

  Have you ever heard of Nivien Therapeutics? Unless you follow the oncology world pretty closely, probably not. But they are – well, were – a startup out of Harvard that was working on a promising approach to overcoming chemotherapy resistance in pancreatic cancer. Now that’s what we call an “unmet medical need”, consid… Read More

• Drug Assays

  A Magic Methyl, Spotted in the Wild

  7 November, 2018

  You hear medicinal chemists talking about the “magic methyl”, the big effect that a single CH3 group can have on potency or selectivity. Here’s a new J. Med. Chem. paper that shows one in action.That structure looks like a kinase inhibitor if anything ever did, and so it is. But small changes to it can… Read More