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 "Natural Products"

• Biological News

  Bacteria and Depression: Something to Test

  17 January, 2019

  Microbiome, microbiome – you haven’t been able to turn around in this business the last few years without hitting some sort of story about the microbiome. It’s easy to roll your eyes and decide that it’s all hype, but that’s the thing: it really is important. It can’t be dismissed just because we don’t unde… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Artemisia Comes Through Again

  9 January, 2019

  Here’s an unusual twist for you. Many readers will be familiar – to their regret, most likely – with the story of T*ring Pharmaceuticals (name redacted slightly in order to not defame a great scientist whose name was tacked on to this outfit for no reason other than advertising). Their first idea was to go… Read More

• Natural Products

  A Slow, Slow Retraction

  10 July, 2018

  Some readers may recall this post from 2015, which details problems with a natural product isolation paper in PLOS ONE. The compound, named Xinghaiamine A by the authors, was. . .well, let’s say extremely unlikely, and I think anyone who looks at the structure in that earlier post will agree. And that spans several levels… Read More

• Chemical News

  Stop Ignoring the Sugars!

  7 May, 2018

  This paper (from two groups at Yale’s chemistry department) addresses several important things that fall into the “important irritants” category in synthesis and molecular biology – or maybe that should be “irritatingly important”. We spend a lot of time thinking about proteins in terms of their primary sequence… Read More

• Chemical News

  The Thoughts of George Whitesides, Part I

  12 April, 2018

  A number of readers have mentioned this new paper by George Whitesides on organic synthesis. I can state as a fact that the first time I heard a joking reference to his attitude towards traditional synthetic organic chemistry was in the summer of 1983, so it’s not like he’s been keeping his thoughts bottled up. Read More

• Natural Products

  Scooped, I Suppose the Word Is

  17 January, 2018

  Via Retraction Watch, here’s a situation that I don’t recall seeing before: a group at Foshan University in China published a paper in the journal Natural Product Research on the crystal structure of aspergicine. Here’s the original abstract in PubMed – their work prompted them to revise their previously published structure… Read More

• Natural Products

  How Many Natural Products Are Being Found? And How Many Are There?

  10 October, 2017

  Time to talk natural products for a post. There was a paper earlier this year in PNAS that looked at the entire set of microbial and marine natural producrs reported from 1941 to 2015, looking for trends that might be useful. (Plant-derived compounds were not included, unfortunately, because there was no suitable database as there… Read More

• Natural Products

  Sodium Benzoate Nonsense

  24 July, 2017

  I don’t spend a lot of time on the blog swatting down idiotic ideas about chemicals. It’s a full time job, and (see next post) I already have a full time job. It’s also frustrating work, because the supply of idiocy is apparently beyond limit, and just when you think you’ve seen the most clueless… Read More

• Natural Products

  Natural Products: Always Coming Back

  11 July, 2017

  I get asked fairly often about natural products in drug discovery – it’s a topic that appeals to reporters and the general public, since the idea of pulling some sort of cure out of the rain forest or a deep-sea coral is interesting and dramatic. (Of course, some of the natural product cures have come… Read More

• Drug Assays

  Cryptic Natural Products Appearing

  3 July, 2017

  I last wrote about “cryptic natural products” here – this is the idea that there must be a great many interesting compounds produced by microorganisms that we have not seen yet. It’s for sure that there are many biosynthetic-looking gene clusters found in these species that don’t seem to be turned on most of the… Read More