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 "The Scientific Literature"

• Chemical News

  Scaffold Popularity

  9 January, 2018

  Here’s a paper that’s analyzing the popularity of different structural scaffolds in medicinal chemistry over time. The authors are using the ChEMBL database and looking for the core structures with the most work done on them, tracking changes over time (1998-2014). That’s a set of nearly 283,000 unique compounds to work with, but… Read More

• The Scientific Literature

  An Odd Paper?

  17 November, 2017

  Nanoparticles came up around here the other day, and now a reader sends along a new paper in the field that’s. . .a bit odd. Maybe more than a bit. It’s been accepted at ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, and you have to wonder what the referee reports were like. It’s titled “Earthicle: The Design… Read More

• Pharmacokinetics

  Fewer Flashy Drug Delivery Papers, Please

  2 November, 2017

  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

• Biological News

  Bad Cells. So Many Bad Cells.

  20 October, 2017

  Let’s file this one under “We’ve seen this before, and I’ll bet we’ll see it again”. Anyone who’s worked for some years in cell culture (or with people who have) should appreciate the dangers of cell line contamination. You can get mycoplasma, you can get other cell lines entirely (particularly others that… Read More

• Cancer

  There Are Probes, And There Are Probes

  9 October, 2017

  A friend in the business called my attention to this paper, which is about another piece of the ubiquitination system that I was writing about here just the other day – in this case, the deubiquitinating enzyme Rpn11. There are a couple of classes of deubiquitinators – some of them use a cysteine in their… Read More

• The Dark Side

  The Ugly State of the Literature These Days

  15 September, 2017

  So how’s it going out there in the land of the journals that will publish any flippin’ thing you send them? Apparently pretty well. I’m not sure if we’re still in the log phase of their growth or not, but there’s no shortage of quasi-open-access titles out there, the ones that (like reputable OA journals) Read More

• The Scientific Literature

  Publish and Prosper

  25 August, 2017

  What do you get if you publish a paper in a highly-ranked journal? Some prestige, certainly. If you’re in academia, it certainly helps your application for tenure, and it’s no bad thing come grant renewal time. Looks good on your CV if you’re applying for another job, no doubt. But how about a big pile… Read More

• The Dark Side

  Thoughts on Reproducibility

  9 August, 2017

  Not too long ago, I was talking to someone outside the field about the “reproducibility crisis”. They’d heard that there were many published papers whose results weren’t solid, and wanted to know if I’d encountered that. I had to tell them that yep, I sure had, and that just about anyone who’s worked in any… Read More

• Chemical Biology

  Ignoring the Literature, Selectively

  18 July, 2017

  Very little time for blogging today (travel), but I wanted to pass on some words of wisdom from Kevan Shokat, from a recent Perspectives piece in Nature Reviews Cancer. Talking about chemical probes, and how to know if they’re valid enough to work with, he suggests that you need to see dose-response data (for one… Read More

• Cancer

  How to Know When a New Target is Really a New Target

  30 June, 2017

  This is an excellent article, and the title is self-recommending: “Common Pitfalls in Preclinical Cancer Target Validation”. The abstract speaketh the truth: An alarming number of papers from laboratories nominating new cancer drug targets contain findings that cannot be reproduced by others or are simply not robust enough to justify dr… Read More