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.
This is a good article at C&E News on the “lab of the future”, and I’ll go ahead and make the standard comment that this has been the lab of the future for quite a while now. The idea is to have mechanical automation and experiment-evaluating software fitting together to “close the loop” and make… Read More
I’ve had a lot of people ask me about yesterday’s protein folding news as it relates to drug discovery. And while I did a post on that last year, I thought it might be useful to briefly lay out the real problems with drug discovery, as I see them. Most folks in drug discovery will… Read More
I was speaking to a university audience the other day (over Zoom, of course) and as I often do I mentioned the studies that have looked at what kinds of reactions medicinal chemists actually use. The cliché is that we spend most of our time doing things like metal-catalyzed couplings and amide formation, and well… Read More
A former colleague was telling me the other day about some not-so-pleasant surprises that occurred when he was helping to clean out a lab that hadn’t had some cabinets opened in a while, and I think many readers will have had such experiences. Academic labs are particularly prone to Easter eggs of this sort, since… 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
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
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
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
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
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
