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.
Let’s have a look at the recent new drug approvals. 2018 was quite a year, by the numbers. C&E News has a comprehensive roundup: 59 approvals (versus 46 in 2017, which was already a record by itself), and about two-thirds of those small molecules. There are some very interesting molecules in the list, and I… Read More
Here’s a strongly opinionated look at where the “precision medicine” field is these days, and I think that this is just the sort of article that the field (and the journalists covering it) need to see, whether you agree with it or not: In 1999 Francis Collins published a foundational document of precision medicine entitled… Read More
This article from Science is a good look at the scientific state of organic synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. It covers a range of topics which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog as well: synthetic advances such as late-stage functionalization, new bond-forming techniques (photoredox chemistry in particular), the intersection… Read More
Now here’s an interesting connection between cancer and metabolism, with what look to be direct implications for therapy. A large research team (mostly working out of Weill Cornell) reports some new and important details about PI3K inhibitors, a class of kinase inhibitors that has seen a very large amount of development work indeed. I’v… Read More
The drug industry has a huge stockpile of results on projects that have not worked. That much is clear – clinical success rates continue at about 10%, on average, so we have a steady stream failures of all kinds, for all reasons. It would be foolish not to learn as much as we could from… Read More
Any article titled “How to Engineer Biology” is going to get a look from me – and when I’m referenced in the opening paragraphs, especially so. This is a piece by Vijay Pande in Scientific American, and I get called out for my naming of the “Andy Grove Fallacy” (found in this post and the… Read More
Peter Kenny has a paper out on ligand efficiency that’s required reading for medicinal chemists using (or thinking about) that concept as a design tool. I’d recommend reading it with this recent paper – between the two of them, you’re going to have references to a huge swath of the literature on how to measure… Read More
In this 2015 post I looked at the cancer stem cell field – the idea that some tumor types are kept going by a stem cell population, and that unless these are dealt with, no durable response to treatment can be expected. A number of pharma companies have looked into this idea, most famously (and… Read More
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to Frances Arnold (for directed evolution of enzymes) and to George Smith and Gregory Winter for phage display. These are worthy discoveries, techniques that have gone on to be used for a huge variety of work ranging from blue-sky research to marketed drugs, and the Nobel committee… Read More
As many had expected, the Nobel prize in medicine/physiology this year recognizes advances in immuno-oncology: James Allison (for CTLA4) and Tasuku Honjo (PD-1). For some years now, that has been a huge, massive, unstoppable wave in cancer research, and I would not want to try to estimate how much time, effort, and money has gone… Read More
