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.
My intent is to start mixing in some non-coronavirus posts along with my pandemic science coverage – you know, like the blog used to be way back earlier in the year (!) Today’s subject might be a good transitional one – it’s an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on coronavirus drug discovery… Read More
We have a lot more vaccine news to catch up on, and I’ll use this as a new “frontrunning vaccine candidates” post, replacing this one (and updates therein) from about a month back. That one will give you some more general information on most of the projects below; if you haven’t read it, it’ll be a… Read More
I’ve had a lot of questions from people about the prospects for monoclonal antibodies and vaccines against the coronavirus, and I thought that it might be helpful to answer them in this format. Let’s start the press conference! We’ll start with monoclonal antibodies. Why are you so optimistic that this technology will work? Two bi… 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
Antibodies as a therapy Let’s have a look at what is (in my opinion) probably our best shot at a reasonably short-term targeted therapy against the COVID-19 epidemic: the possibility of using monoclonal antibodies. These can be developed more quickly than vaccines, and a lot more quickly than a new targeted small-molecule antiviral. Like ever… Read More
Among the many drug-discovery lessons that this pandemic is highlighting is the difficulty of meeting the challenges of a new target, a new pathogen, a new disease, or a new mechanism of action. When you look at the history of the drug industry, the typical time for an effective therapy to be developed from a… Read More
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
