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 need for good chemical probes continues, and (sadly) so does the use of crappy ones. That’s what I took away from this recent paper from a multicenter team out of London. They’re looking at commonly used probes for inhibition of N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) enzymes, and it’s one of those good-news/bad-news situations. N-myrist… Read More
Here’s a note of warning sounded in a lead editorial in Nature: . . .I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research. . . . . .many researchers… Read More
I’m traveling today, but as I was scrolling through my RSS feeds on the plane (OK, yeah, I know, but they had free Wi-Fi and why not), I thought about how people of around my scientific generation, maybe a bit younger and certainly the older ones, often talk about how they miss flipping through the… Read More
Yep, folks, we’re doing it wrong. Making these small molecules, these biologics, all of it – we worry about pharmacokinetics and exposure, about side effects and potency and selectivity, and all the time we could be dosing folks with magic water. That’s what you’d get out of reading the literature on “release-active dr… Read More
You may have seen the headlines about a large settlement ($112.5 million) that Duke University is paying the government. This goes back to Erin Potts-Kant, a clinical research coordinator at Duke Health, as well as (former) professor William Foster and (former) chief of the Pulmonary Division Monica Kraft. The details are many, and some of them… Read More
The science publishing struggles are not calming down – just the opposite. As of yesterday, the entire University of California system is no longer subscribing to Elsevier journals. That’s a mighty big university system and a mighty big publisher; this is Godzilla vs. Megalon. The dispute is around two mighty big issues as well. The… Read More
I had a book review recently in Nature, on a new volume (Thrifty Science) that looks over the history of early scientific experimentation from the viewpoint of its frugal nature – the idea of reusing and repurposing equipment, objects, and even rooms in one’s house. There was indeed a lot of this sort of thing… Read More
Here’s a personal experience with fraudulent scientific literature, as reported in Nature: In 2015, I discovered several papers had been written about a gene that I and my colleagues first reported in 1998. All were by different authors based in China, but contained shared and strange irregularities. They also used highly similar language and… Read More
A brief discussion the other day on Twitter got me to thinking about the lost world of literature searching – back when everything was bound journals and paper. My whole grad school career took place in the pre-PDF world, and a good part of it was pre-CAS Online. So those of you from that era… Read More
Update: see the comments section. The editors of the journal are calling this “a highly unusual and unfortunate error” and are taking steps to correct it. Now, this is a situation that I haven’t seen mentioned before. A reader (from one division of a large pharma company that I won’t name) had prepared a manuscript… Read More
