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.
Man, Alzheimer’s. That’s my reaction to yesterday’s news in the field. Merck started things off with news of their last-ditch attempt to see if their beta-secretase (BACE) inhibitor verubecestat (MK-8931) could be useful. I’ve been writing about that one for a while – here’s 2012, when they announced that the com… Read More
From Chris Chambers on Twitter (of Cardiff Univ.) come some very important points about press coverage of scientific results. I often make references here to misleading and inaccurate headlines and stories in the popular press – as a scientist, it’s hard to take, seeing research results mangled in the only venues that most people will… Read More
This new paper has generated a lot of headlines (Science news writeup here). It reports work on the long-sought “liquid biopsy” idea for cancer screening, the use of circulating biomarkers to detect tumors via a blood test. The idea has obvious appeal, so much appeal that many news stories over the years have gotten well… Read More
There was some Alzheimer’s news the other day, but it wasn’t actually about Alzheimer’s. Not very much. It was more about hype, press releases, and a grievous lack of understanding of statistics. Via @AndyBiotech and @biotechtoreador on Twitter, I came across this release about an announcement from a small company called Neurot… Read More
OK, enough people have emailed me the press coverage of the students in Sydney making daraprim, which is the drug that Martin Shkreli’s former firm has famously jacked up the price of. From what I can see, a lot of the news stories on this are missing the point. Daraprim is not hard to make in… Read More
I fear that mentioning the phrase “Big Data” in the first sentence of a blog post will make half the potential readers suddenly remember that they have podiatrist appointments or something. But that’s the only way to approach this article at Wired. After all, the title is “The Cure For Cancer is Data – Mountains of… Read More
So today brings news that Microsoft is working on curing cancer in the next five or ten years. That, I’m sure, will come as a relief, especially to those people who’ve had the company’s software crash on them recently. For some reason, the UK press is especially susceptible to Amazing Cancer Cure stories (and to… Read More
Here’s a gauntlet thrown down – let’s see how many people show up to the duel. Vinay Prasad has a piece in Nature titled “The Precision Oncology Illusion”, with the subhead saying “Precision oncology has not been shown to work, and perhaps it never will”. (Here’s Prasad earlier this year, with co-auth… Read More
The folks at Stat clearly have some good sources inside Google’s Verily startup. They ran a story back in March about problems with the CEO (blogged about here), and now they’re back with more opinion from within. This piece has a number of people expressing dissatisfaction with how Verily’s three big projects are actually going… Read More
An old colleague of mine sent along this story from India. It’s about the problems that GVK Bio had in 2015, which led to all sorts of consequences: In October this year, a national newspaper in India ran a front page news item with the headline “A love story that cost GVK its international reputation”. The story… Read More
