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"

• 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

• Drug Assays

  Thoughts on Compound Collections

  6 April, 2018

  I’ve recently had similar questions from two different people (on two different coasts) about screening collections and compound libraries, so it seems like it could be a topic of interest. So far I have yet to come across a drug discovery organization that really thinks that its compound libraries are what they should be – Read More

• Drug Assays

  One Way to Find Out

  14 March, 2018

  Here’s a thing about research (and drug discovery in particular) that makes it a bit different from many other occupations: you can go for extended periods without even being sure that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. This thought came to mind yesterday when (on Twitter) Ash Jogalekar quoted a biotech veteran as… Read More

• Life in the Drug Labs

  Chemicals, Shelves and Shelves of Them

  24 January, 2018

  My mention yesterday of the number of starting materials needed for drug synthesis prompted a reader outside the industry to ask just how many I might be talking about, and how these things are managed. I looked over the paper being discussed, just for an example, and for its three drug syntheses it needed a… Read More