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 "Life in the Drug Labs"

• Drug Assays

  Lilly’s Virtual Med-Chem Assistant

  14 June, 2019

  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

• Life in the Drug Labs

  The Killer Experiment

  21 May, 2019

  Bruce Booth has some thoughts here on a recent Harvard Business Review piece on startups, but don’t let the fact that it’s from HBR put you off from taking a look. The original article is focused on innovation in general, but Booth ties it more directly to biopharma culture, and his advice certainly looks sound… Read More

• Chemical News

  The Downside of Chemistry Automation

  13 May, 2019

  Automation in chemistry (especially industrial chemistry) is so pervasive that we hardly even notice it any more. (I have a whole talk that I give that’s partly on that very subject). But what is automation for? That’s the subject of this short piece in ACS Med. Chem. Letters by Jeffrey Pan of AbbVie. The answer… Read More

• Chemical News

  Nostalgie de la Boue

  27 December, 2018

  Alfred Bader’s passing reminds me that there’s an earlier generation – now almost completely gone – that regarded the likes of Aldrich Chemical as fancy upstarts. There has (had?) always been a tradition in organic chemistry of making reagents fresh for your own use, either because there were no commercial suppliers (which i… Read More

• Drug Assays

  A Magic Methyl, Spotted in the Wild

  7 November, 2018

  You hear medicinal chemists talking about the “magic methyl”, the big effect that a single CH3 group can have on potency or selectivity. Here’s a new J. Med. Chem. paper that shows one in action.That structure looks like a kinase inhibitor if anything ever did, and so it is. But small changes to it can… Read More

• Chemical News

  Simple Rings, Simply Wrong

  26 September, 2018

  Medicinal chemists spend a lot of time thinking about the relative greasiness of their molecules. Being professional scientists, of course, we have come up with some slightly more quantitative phrases than “relative greasiness”, but that’s definitely the idea. How hydrophilic/hydrophobic a compound is determines not to what extent… Read More

• Life in the Drug Labs

  Med-Chem Labs: What’s Changed?

  27 August, 2018

  Traveling today, so not much time for a full-scale post. But I wanted to toss out a question to my fellow medicinal chemists instead. I was talking with some colleagues the other day, including a couple of people who’d been around for a while, and we were discussing what things med-chemists used to spend more… Read More

• Drug Development

  On Jadedness

  20 July, 2018

  It’s a Friday in midsummer, so I assume that a fair percentage of the readership is not even around! So I’m not going to do a huge detailed blog post (got one of those coming on Monday, actually). Today I just wanted to go on a bit about a problem that comes with experience in… Read More

• Business and Markets

  That Other Kind of Job

  18 June, 2018

  This tweet by ChemJobber caught my eye over the weekend. He’s referencing an article in the New Yorker on “The Bullshit-Job Boom”, which is a review of this new book by David Graeber at the London School of Economics. Graeber’s thesis is that there is a higher and higher fraction of the labor market occupied… 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