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.
I recently had a question from an interested reader, who’s outside of medicinal chemistry, wondering about how we find room to work in patent space. From his viewpoint, there seemed to be many areas that were so worked over that he found it had to see how any new project could make headway, or be… Read More
I had an interesting note this morning from a reader who’s been asked about writing an introductory textbook on medicinal chemistry. He’s been looking over the field, and wondering what to include (and what to leave out). Quite a few current med-chem texts have a fairly robust section on combichem, for example, but many of… Read More
Erland Stevens at Davidson is going to be running an online med-chem course on EdX, the MOOC platform founded by Harvard and MIT. It starts in October, runs for 8 weeks, can be audited for free, and covers these topics: (1) The drug approval process (early drugs, clinical trials, IP factors) (2) Enzymes and receptors… Read More
Reader Andy Breuninger, from completely outside the biopharma business, sends along what I think is an interesting question, and one that bears on a number of issues: A question has been bugging me that I hope you might answer. My understanding is that a lot of your work comes down to taking a seed molecule… Read More
There was a question in the comments from a reader who’s picking up med-chem, and I thought it was worth answering out here. I’ve been meaning to shore up the “Pharma 101” category, and this is a good opportunity. So how, in a case like that compound in the previous post, do you increase a… Read More
I gave my talk at the Drew University Medicinal Chemistry course, and it got me to thinking about when I was there (1990 or 1991), and my early days in medicinal chemistry in general. There are a lot of things that have to be learned when coming out of a synthetic organic chemistry background, and… Read More
So how do drug molecules (and others) get into cells, anyway? There are two broad answers: they just sort of slide in through the membranes on their own (passive diffusion), or they’re taken up by pores and proteins built for bringing things in (active transport). I’ve always been taught (and believed) that both processes can… Read More
I was just talking about greasy compounds the other day, and reasons to avoid them. Right on cue, there’s a review article in Expert Opinion in Drug Discovery on lipophilicity. It has some nice data in it, and I wanted to share a bit of it here. It’s worth noting that you can make your… Read More
I get regular requests to recommend books on various aspects of medicinal chemistry and drug development. And while I have a few things on my list, I’m sure that I’m missing many more. So I wanted to throw this out to the readership: what do you think are the best places to turn? This way… Read More
Why do we test drugs on animals, anyway? This question showed up in the comments section from a lay reader. It’s definitely a fair thing to ask, and you’d expect that we in the business would have a good answer. So here it is: because for all we know about biochemistry, about physiology and about… Read More
