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.
The cell membrane – the fundamental architecture of living things, the foundation of how our very bodies are organized – is a major pain in the behind. I express this ungrateful opinion merely because over the years it has rejected entry to some of my best ideas for drug candidates, and I bear a grudge. Read More
We medicinal chemists are used to thinking about small molecule drugs – it’s what we do. And we’re also comfortable with having a category in our worldview that we assign to “biologics” – proteins, mostly, many of them antibodies, which can also be extremely therapeutically effective under the right conditions. B… Read More
I like this review, but I’ve seen it before. Well, not this exact manuscript, but every few years it seems there’s another one with a similar title, something about “Incorporating Silicon Into Drug Structures”. I am guilty of the exact same thing, though: here’s a blog post from 2004 on the topic, and here’s one… Read More
This is a neat article at Bloomberg about the production of botulinum toxin (BTX, aka Botox). This is a drug that has some rather special handling involved: A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year. That little bit is derived from a larger primary source… Read More
Drug delivery – now that’s a tricky field. The variety of drug substances is large, and the ways that they’re taken up and distributed in living systems are many. And we’d like control over the process, which we don’t often have. A typical kid’s question is “How does the aspirin know where the headache is?… Read More
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
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
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
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
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
