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.
One of the reasons that people in or near this business can write such gaudy press releases is that it has so many moving parts. That lets everyone claim that the part that they’re addressing is Crucial. Think of a car: the wheels are indeed key to mobility, but so is the engine. As is… Read More
OK, today’s blog post is going to be even weirder than usual – we’re going to wander off into quantum mechanics. And into a particular borderland of it where have been a lot of interesting hypotheses and speculations, but plenty of hand-waving hoo-hah, so it’s important to realize the risks up front. But here we go. Read More
Here is an interesting paper in Nature Biotechnology on computational drug design, and if you read it without reading any of the accompanying articles about it, you will have a perfectly good time. There are things that you will be impressed by, and there are things that you will argue with, but that’s how most papers… Read More
Here’s another step along the way to automated synthesis, in a new paper from MIT. The eventual hope is to unite the software and the hardware in this area, both of which are developing these days, and come up with a system that can produce new compounds with a minimum of human intervention. Let’s stipulate… Read More
Here’s a ring system that you’ve never used before – the cyclopropyl system in purple at the end of the row in the diagram at right. It’s described in this paper from GSK-Stevenage as a new morpholine isostere. A 4-morpholino-pyrimidine hinge binder core is preferred in many PI3K and PIKK inhibitors, but the team was… Read More
Since I was just blogging the other day about a machine-learning paper that worked its way through decades of abstracts for materials science papers, this news is timely. Carl Malamud and a team at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi have assembled a rather huge repository of journal articles (they’re aiming for about 73 million of… Read More
Here’s a new paper on ChemRxiv that is very much worth reading if you’re a computational chemist (or work with them). And it makes a larger point that’s applicable to everyone else – not an original point, I fear, but it keeps on coming up. The computational part first: it has to do with Density… Read More
We’ve made it to the point – a while back, actually – where people who actually know the subject roll their eyes a bit when the term “artificial intelligence” is used without some acknowledgment that it’s not very useful. I think that’s a real sign that it’s becoming useful. Things are to the point wh… Read More
Here’s an interesting new paper from Lilly (brought to my attention by Ash Jogalekar on Twitter). “Creating a virtual assistant for medicinal chemistry” is the title, but fear not: this is not something that’s come to elbow you aside at the bench. Well, not yet. What they’re talking about is a software agent that is… Read More
The recent post here on automation in chemistry (especially medicinal chemistry) is a good intro for this paper in ACS Med. Chem. Letters. It’s from David Parry, who led Cyclofluidic, and I’ve blogged about them a few times over the years. That was a company formed in 2008 in the UK to try to develop… Read More
