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

  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

• Drug Assays

  Ligand Efficiency Rethought

  1 November, 2018

  Peter Kenny has a paper out on ligand efficiency that’s required reading for medicinal chemists using (or thinking about) that concept as a design tool. I’d recommend reading it with this recent paper – between the two of them, you’re going to have references to a huge swath of the literature on how to measure… 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

• Drug Assays

  A New Antibiotic? Yes, Please

  14 September, 2018

  New antibiotics against resistant Gram-negative bacteria make me happy, so I’m very glad to see this report from Genentech. They’ve been doing a lot of work on an antibiotic scaffold (arylomycins, Update: on a program that came in whey they bought RQx) which had not thus far really found much practical use, and it looks… 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

• Business and Markets

  Anarchist Drugs For All. Yeahboy.

  30 July, 2018

  I’ve had numerous requests for my opinion about this article, so here it comes: it’s largely bullshit. It’s about “a volunteer network of anarchists and hackers developing DIY medical technologies”, and I can see why Vice.com is running the article, because that drugs/anarchists/hackers combo is absolute catnip to thei… Read More

• Drug Development

  On Jadedness

  20 July, 2018

  It’s a Friday in midsummer, so I assume that a fair percentage of the readership is not even around! So I’m not going to do a huge detailed blog post (got one of those coming on Monday, actually). Today I just wanted to go on a bit about a problem that comes with experience in… Read More

• Alzheimer's Disease

  The Case of Verge Genomics

  17 July, 2018

  A number of people have passed along the recent press stories about Verge Genomics, a new company out of YCombinator that has just raised $32 million for neuroscience drug discovery. Now that, as literally anyone who’s ever done it can tell you, is a hard field of a hard field, and I wish Verge good… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Entropic Term is Laughing At Us

  11 July, 2018

  There are plenty of things to optimize in a med-chem project other than binding affinity. But if you don’t have at least some level of binding, you may not have a med-chem project. And while from the outside, you might think that understanding how and why compound A binds to a given target while compound… Read More