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.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Drug Industry History"

• Biological News

  Engineering Biology, For Real?

  12 November, 2018

  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

• Drug Assays

  Ligand Efficiency Rethought

  1 November, 2018

  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

• Cancer

  The Cancer Stem Cell Saga

  15 October, 2018

  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

• Biological News

  The Chemistry Nobels, 2018

  3 October, 2018

  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

• Cancer

  A Nobel for Immuno-Oncology

  1 October, 2018

  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

• Cancer

  Why Not Target DNA? Well. . .

  28 June, 2018

  There are all sorts of small-molecule drugs that bind to protein targets. Active sites of enzymes are, of course, a big subset of those, but there are plenty of enzymes whose allosteric sites are known to host synthetic ligands as well. Membrane receptor and ion channel proteins get both of those mechanisms too, and then… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Gene Therapy for Duchenne

  19 June, 2018

  I have said unkind things about Sarepta’s drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Exondys (eteplirsen). That’s because I did not think that there was enough information to approve it at the FDA, and I had trouble believing that its biochemical effects were enough to be meaningful in general. I have no reason to modify those opinions… Read More

• Drug Development

  How to Be a Good Medicinal Chemist

  22 May, 2018

  Longtime medicinal chemist Mark Murcko has a Perspective article out in J. Med. Chem. on “What Makes a Great Medicinal Chemist“. As he makes clear from the beginning, if you’ve been doing this stuff for a while, you’ve likely heard many of these recommendations before. But it’s useful for people starting out, and it… Read More

• Cancer

  Cancer Sequencing Hype And Reality

  2 May, 2018

  This piece in Science says something that needs to be said louder and more publicly. If you live in the US, you’ve surely seen various cancer treatment centers talking about their personalized therapy plans, and especially how they’ll tailor things to your DNA sequence and so on. You would get the impression that we have… Read More

• Cancer

  IDO Appears to Have Wiped Out

  1 May, 2018

  We have the answer to a question posed here earlier this month. That was after the Merck/Incyte failure of a combination of Keytruda and Incyte’s IDO (indole 2,3-dioxygenase) inhibitor. That mechanism was supposed to increase T-cell activity, but the trial showed it to have no effect on Keytruda’s efficacy at all. Earlier IDO trials had… Read More