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 "Pharmacokinetics"

• Cancer

  Watch Your Covalent Drugs Carefully

  31 October, 2017

  EGFR is a growth-factor receptor protein that’s well known as a cancer target, and there are a number of drugs that target its kinase activity in order to shut it down. But as is also well known, many cancer cells are rather genomically unstable, and throw off mutations constantly. One of the most common problems… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Alnylam Breaks Through

  20 September, 2017

  As a pioneer in RNAi therapeutics, Alnylam has really had some ups and downs over the years (some of them chronicled on this blog). Today would be one of the “up” moments, for sure. The company (in collaboration with Sanofi) has just announced positive Phase 3 data on their therapy for hereditary ATTR amyloidosis – Read More

• Pharmacokinetics

  Adverse Events: A Look Under the Hood

  29 August, 2017

  As most people know, there’s an FDA Adverse Event Reporting System, which is supposed to capture any sort of problems that turn up with approved drugs. Certainly if you have any kind of job in the industry, you know about it – every corporate training program includes a section about how if you hear about… Read More

• Clinical Trials

  Ultrasound For Brain Drug Delivery – Not So Fast

  23 August, 2017

  I wrote a couple of years ago here about the idea of making the blood-brain barrier more permeable by the use of focused ultrasound, in the presence of injected microbubbles. This would be a very useful thing if it works – as anyone who’s been concerned with central nervous system drugs (or drug delivery in… Read More

• Cancer

  What We Can Do, Versus What We Could

  11 August, 2017

  I remember reading Barry Sharpless’ big “click” chemistry paper in 2001, where he proposed the term for reactions that take place rapidly, selectively, and without any outside reagents, and proposed such techniques for the rapid assembly of diverse molecules. In the years since, the term has drifted away a bit at times to mean … Read More

• Biological News

  Turmoil in Immuno-oncology

  12 May, 2017

  Immuno-oncology! It’s such a big deal, let’s just do what everyone in the field is doing and call it “IO”. The recent successes in this area have rearranged every company’s oncology strategy, in some cases rearranging its entire oncology portfolio right out the door. There are several possibilities open to you now, if… Read More

• Pharmacokinetics

  The First Deuterated Drug Arrives

  4 April, 2017

  The first deuterated drug has finally been approved by the FDA. It’s Austedo (deutetrabenazine), from Teva, and it targets Huntington’s chorea. This is an interesting development on several levels. The idea of adding deuteriums (instead of plain hydrogens) to drug structures had been kicking around for many years, but only in the last 8… Read More

• Chemical News

  Macrocycles For the Making

  29 March, 2017

  I meant to write about this paper at the time, but there’s no harm in highlighting it now. A group at the University of Toronto reports a neat way to make some unusual macrocycles, by closing down an amine and a carboxylic acid into an oxadiazole with the known isonitrile phosphorane reagent shown. You bring… Read More

• How Not to Do It

  How Not to Do It: Dosing Volunteers

  27 January, 2017

  Well, here I post about the ethical problems of using normal volunteers in Phase I studies, and this story comes along. It’s not exactly an investigational drug trial – two students (in “Sports Science”) at Northumbria University in England were being given caffeine to measure its effects on exercise. But there was a bit of… Read More

• Chemical Biology

  Curcumin Will Waste Your Time

  12 January, 2017

  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