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"

• 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

• Drug Development

  BenevolentAI: Worth Two Billion?

  23 April, 2018

  Regular readers will know that I have no problem believing that AI (in its various forms) will definitely have an impact on drug discovery. And regular readers will also know that I’m quite skeptical that it’s going to have an immediate impact on the high-level functions of drug discovery (what target to go after, what… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Cost of Trials

  22 February, 2018

  There’s been an interesting discussion about pharma R&D productivity and drug pricing on Twitter the last few days – here’s the starting point, from John Tucker. His thesis is that the hefty rate of inflation for medical services/hospitalization, where the data seem alarmingly solid, is one of the things driving the problem. T… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  A New Look at Clinical Success Rates

  2 February, 2018

  Andrew Lo of MIT and his co-workers have published a really interesting paper on clinical trial probability-of-success numbers. It appears to be the largest such effort yet: In this article, we construct estimates of the POS and other related risk characteristics of clinical trials using 406 038 entries of industry- and non-industry-sponsored trial… Read More

• Chemical News

  Scaffold Popularity

  9 January, 2018

  Here’s a paper that’s analyzing the popularity of different structural scaffolds in medicinal chemistry over time. The authors are using the ChEMBL database and looking for the core structures with the most work done on them, tracking changes over time (1998-2014). That’s a set of nearly 283,000 unique compounds to work with, but… Read More

• Chemical News

  Sixty-Three Years in Chemistry: An Interview with Donald Batesky

  1 December, 2017

  So I wrote here about Donald Batesky, the 85-year-old synthetic organic chemist at the University of Rochester who recently published a paper in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. He contacted me afterwards, and I ended up talking to him for quite a while about his career, which has been long (clearly!) and varied. With his permission… Read More

• Drug Industry History

  Reading the Minds of Medicinal Chemists

  30 November, 2017

  I suppose that all of us medicinal chemists should be flattered by this press release. According to it: Medicinal chemistry is among one of the most important and intellectually-challenging professions on the planet. It takes decades of training and experience to learn the properties of the thousands of molecules and their effects on the biological… Read More

• Business and Markets

  A Grim Future? Here Are the Numbers.

  28 November, 2017

  Here’s a bracing look at the state of the pharma business, especially regarding R&D costs and return on investment. And let me warn you – it’s not a feel-good sort of article, but the figures are hard to refute. The author, Kelvin Stott, comes out swinging: Here I apply a far simpler, much more robust… Read More

• Business and Markets

  More Movements at the Top of GSK

  9 November, 2017

  GlaxoSmithKline has been having more than its share of ups and downs over the last few years. In 2014, they moved a lot of assets out of oncology, as part of a general rearrangement into higher-volume lower-cost areas. That was a pretty bold move – give management credit for not being timid, at least – Read More