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.
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
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
