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.
Many folks outside of this industry don’t realize that the FDA sends inspectors to drug manufacturing facilities in other countries. That might sound a bit odd, but agreeing to such inspections is in fact a condition of being able to sell pharmaceutical substances in the US (or to supply other companies that do). It’s a… Read More
I suppose this will be sort of a chemical engineering, scale-up, process chemistry post. . .and most certainly will be filed here under the “How Not to Do It” category. The Bellingcat group (Dan Kaszeta in particular) have a very interesting look at a display in “Patriot Park” (a military-themed destination located in a town… Read More
I’ve come across several odd facts and stories from an old (1927) book called The Romance of Chemistry, given to me in person by Mark Nelson of Frontier Scientific.* Among these is an alarming incident I hadn’t heard about before, one that took place in Oppau, Germany, in 1921. BASF had built a large facility… Read More
You may well have heard about an incident at the University of Bristol, where a student inadvertently prepared some triacetone triperoxide (TATP). That’s a substance that I definitely won’t work with, but I haven’t done an entry on it in that category because of its unfortunate significance. No one is going to make a batch… Read More
Well, here I post about the ethical problems of using normal volunteers in Phase I studies, and this story comes along. It’s not exactly an investigational drug trial – two students (in “Sports Science”) at Northumbria University in England were being given caffeine to measure its effects on exercise. But there was a bit of… Read More
Back to science! I will admit that my Twitter feed is going to be rather more politicized than usual for some time to come, but this is not a political site, and thank God for that. I have to say, it certainly brings in the comments and the traffic, but that’s not my goal in life. Read More
Via Reddit’s r/chemistry, we have this alarming footage of what is apparently about two tons of fuming nitric acid that has burst out of a tanker truck. This article on the Russian news site RT.com says that it took place several days ago in, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and that the driver was nowhere to be seen. Read More
Ah, the good old nitric acid/sulfuric acid nitration conditions. A classic reaction if ever there was one. But you don’t want to let it spray all over your lab coat – you really don’t. I have a shirt like the coat in that photo, one that I got from a sulfuric acid splashback in 1984… Read More
We turn now to Orexigen, one of the small companies trying to make headway in the obesity market. Earlier this year, a patent application from them published, claiming that their drug (Contrave, a sustained release formulation combining the known drugs naltrexone and bupropion) had cardiovascular benefits above and beyond its weight-loss effects. P… Read More
Here’s an NMR imaging blog with details of a recent problem in an Indian facility. Two people ended up stuck to the machine, pinned by an oxygen cylinder (!) that one of them brought into the room. Both sustained injuries. There are two questions here: one is how anyone is allowed to wheel a ferromagnetic… Read More
