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
Writing the other day about the lipid formulations used in the current mRNA vaccines makes me want to highlight something else that I hit on from time to time around here. When you learn in school about the major classes of biomolecules, you hear about proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. That’s a reasonable classification… 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
Longtime readers (and longtime drug industry folks!) may remember the Makena story from 2011. That is a progesterone ester drug that has been given to women at risk of preterm labor, and it came into the news when a small company called KV Pharmaceuticals used an FDA program that encouraged modern trials of older medicines… 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
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
I mentioned yesterday in my post about anti-vaccine arguments that there seemed to be suspicions on social media platforms about vaccine testing in Africa. I’ve been looking around for more of that, and finding plenty of it. I’ve also heard from a colleague with some pertinent thoughts about how these things get going, and I… 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
Now that chloroquine is in the news everywhere, I thought it might be interesting to have a closer look at the compound. The first part of this post will be chemistry-heavy, further down we’ll get into the pharmacology and medical uses. Chloroquine’s fame is as an antimalarial drug, and the history of antimalarials starts of… Read More
