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.
Here’s a useful article that looks at the fate of university-licensed startup (ULS) life sciencecompanies over the last few years. There are more and more such companies (a greater than tenfold increase in their number since 1990), but a comprehensive look at success rates (and how such rates vary according to the universities involved) has… 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 mentioned cancer incidence versus cancer mortality the other day, and I wanted to highlight this NEJM paper, which is a recent and comprehensive look at the topic. You can see several different effects in the data. Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for example, has shown a pretty steady incidence rate over the past 40 years, but steadily… 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
We’re seeing a lot of bivalent molecules in drug discovery these days, especially with the popularity of bifunctional protein degrader ligands. The general structure of such thing is (ligand)—-linker—-(ligand), with the two ligands chosen (in the case of targeted protein degradation) to bring a ubiquitin ligase complex up close to… Read More
I have an anniversary to celebrate this time of year: it’s now been thirty years since I started work in industrial drug discovery. Given the state of the industry over that time, just being able to say that at all has called for some luck and some flexibility along the way, but I’m very glad… Read More
The Wall Street Journal published a provocative article the other day, entitled “Don’t Understand Moronic Bromides?” about the proliferation over the years of acronyms in science.(Note the old-fashioned usage of “bromide” derived from the early sleeping pills). And while it’s a cranky piece, it’s not wrong. Read More
Here’s an interesting analysis of the industry from IDEA Pharma, via Endpoints. They’re looking at the revenues from the more recent drugs in the pipeline (approved in the last five years) and comparing that to each company’s total R&D spending. The list is all Big Pharma – the cutoff is companies that have at least… Read More
Hot new technologies! We have waves of them in this business, and everyone talks about them, spends money looking at them, and does deals with small companies who are formed around them. But then reality sets in: only a few of these things march forward into the clinic, and even fewer emerge on the other… Read More
News broke yesterday morning (first at the Wall Street Journal, I believe) that Abbvie has agreed to acquire Allergan. This is one of the larger pharma mergers of recent years, and regular readers of this site will have a pretty good idea of the sigh and roll of the eyes with which I greet it. Read More
