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’ve been meaning to write some more about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and drug discovery, and this paper (open access) by Andreas Bender is an excellent starting point. I’m going to be talking in fairly general terms here, but for practitioners in the field, I can recommend this review of the 2020 literature by Pat Walt… Read More
Here’s a look back at the last ten years of FDA drug approvals, and it’s a pretty encouraging read. As the authors mention, in the early 2000s there was quite a bit of worry about the directions that drug research (and drug approvals) might be taking. We were getting to the end of some of… Read More
I’ve had a lot of people ask me about yesterday’s protein folding news as it relates to drug discovery. And while I did a post on that last year, I thought it might be useful to briefly lay out the real problems with drug discovery, as I see them. Most folks in drug discovery will… Read More
Here’s an article that will not be popular among some constituencies. It’s in a special issue of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, devoted to how these disciplines have responded to the coronavirus pandemic. And in it, Aled Edwards of the Structural Genomics Consortium surveys past attempts at drug repurposing and arrive… Read More
Let’s take a few minutes to talk about biopharma stocks in general – or to be more precise, about some of the people who invest in biopharma stocks. There’s a lot of weird behavior in this area, and the pandemic has amplified it. I refer specifically to the “stock cult” mentality that will be familiar… Read More
We have a sudden influx over the last few days of preclinical rhesus challenge studies with various coronavirus vaccines, and it’s only natural to try to compare them. I have worked up a table with all four of the current results and the previously reported SinoVac inactivated virus vaccine, whose rhesus challenge numbers were officially… Read More
As everyone knows, there have been a lot of attempts to repurpose existing therapies for the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve covered several of these along the way, but it’s time for some updates. The work that’s been going on not only adds to our knowledge about treatment for infected patients, but it should – ideally – Read More
Headlines appeared last night about Moderna losing a patent case that affects its coronavirus vaccine work. I know from long experience on this blog that any discussion of patent and IP issues has an effect on my readership traffic numbers that looks like I’m paying folks not to click on my links that day, but… Read More
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
