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.
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
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
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
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
Determining the structure of a new molecule is one of those things that you’d think would be simple – at least, nonscientists often seem surprised at how much of our time we spend on such problems. (It doesn’t help that dramatic depictions involving chemistry almost invariably skip over this problem in the interest of moving the… Read More
The field of late-stage modification of complex structures has seen several advances in the last few years, and this is just the sort of thing that medicinal chemists tend to be interested in. We like one-step transformations (which organic chemist doesn’t!) and we tend to have large collections of compounds that have already been made. Read More
I really enjoyed reading this article in J. Med. Chem. on curcumin. (Update: here’s the take over at Practical Fragments). That’s a well-known natural product, found in large quantities in turmeric root (which is where most of the yellow color comes from). It has, over the years, been a hit in many, many assays, and… Read More
The virtues and shortcomings of total synthesis are both on display in this new paper from the Baran group at Scripps, “Total Synthesis of Maoecrystal V”. Actually, they’re on display in not only that paper, but in it and in the four previous total syntheses of the molecule, but we’ll get to that. Maoecrystal is… Read More
This is an interesting article, but a lay reader would probably not realize how many important things are left out of it. It’s about a mushroom grower (Tradd Cotter) who’s been studying ways to protect his desired fungi against other pathogens, and who has an idea about extending this work to human therapies. He’s co-culturing… Read More
Since we were just talking yesterday about antibiotics and the misconceptions that people have about them, this is an appropriate time to take a look at an article in the popular press about antibiotic discovery. (Vice.com counts as “popular press”, for sure). The article focuses on the work of Brian Murphy at UI-Chicago, who’s do… Read More
