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.
I wanted to mention this paper, which is one of the more comprehensive ones on the idea of repurposing existing drugs against the coronavirus. It’s a large multicenter team that clearly did a lot of very fast coordination to produce these results. What they’ve done is looked at the complete suite of proteins produced by… Read More
I’ve mentioned it in passing before, but it bears repeating: this is a really unusual moment in drug discovery. We have simultaneously more new modes of action for therapy coming on in the clinic than I can ever recall, and some older ones are getting reworked to join the action. This short overview is a… Read More
It’s our high failure rate in clinical trials that makes the drug industry what it is. And two of the biggest factors in that failure rate are picking the wrong targets/mechanisms, and unexpected toxicity. The first is clearly a failure of our understanding of human biology, and the only remedy I can see for that… Read More
First in humans! That’s a big step for a drug project – you’ve identified a clinical candidate with enough potency, selectivity, etc. to be a plausible drug, you’ve made it past toxicity testing (always a black-box cross-your-fingers exercise), and you’ve figured out a way to dose the stuff in human subjects. But how d… Read More
Here’s a letter from Pat Walters and Mark Murcko of Relay Therapeutics on the September report from Insilico Medicine (blogged here) of a drug discovered by AI, specifically generative methods. Here’s their working definition of what that means, which I think most folks in the field can agree with: . . .In this technique, a deep… Read More
I see that there’s press coverage today of “the first AI-generated drug” to go into human trials. Some will recall this similar claims have been made before, so what exactly are we looking at? The compound is DSP-1181, from a collaboration between Sumitomo and the startup Exscientia (out of Dundee). It’s a long-acting 5-HT1a… Read More
It’s time to talk about a new venture called EQRx. This has made quite a splash in the last few days at the JP Morgan investor conference, and it’s been launched by Alexis Borisy (involved with founding and/or helping run CombinatoRx, Foundation, Blueprint, WarpDrive Bio, Editas, Relay and others) with the aim of generating cheaper… Read More
I will cause no controversy by saying that most of the small-molecule compounds that we develop as potential drugs in this business are rather poorly soluble in water. Every organization I’ve worked in has made the standard jokes about “brick dust” and “powdered Teflon”, and for the well-founded standard reasons. A lot… Read More
I mentioned polymorphs the other day, and no mention of those should go by without a reference to the classic 1995 article on “disappearing polymorphs” and its 2015 follow-up. This is a controversial area, but what everyone can agree on is that there are numerous cases where some particular crystal form of a compound has… Read More
There were some headlines the other day about the “first AI-discovered drug”, so that should send us to the work in question to see what’s going on. The company in question is called Deep Genomics, and here’s what its founder has to say: “Making drugs has traditionally been a gambling game. Big Pharma is throwing… Read More
