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 fundamental challenge of dealing with this pandemic is uncertainty. There are just too many important things that we don’t know – and what’s more, they aren’t easy to find out, either. We’ve seen that with the waves of optimism and pessimism about various therapies, just to pick one. As everyone has been learning … Read More
Here’s a new preprint that goes a long way to telling us what we need to know about coronavirus antibodies and Spike protein mutations. It’s from Jesse Bloom’s group at the Fred Hutchinson center in Seattle, and it’s another one of those experiments that you could only do with modern molecular biology (and modern bioinformat… Read More
News came yesterday from the Recovery trial effort in the UK that they had seen positive results from dexamethasone treatment in severely ill COVID-19 patients (news article from Science here). This set off a number of headlines that everyone has since been trying to deal with, unfortunately, so I thought I should try to do… Read More
DNA-encoded libraries are a technique that many in the field should be familiar with, and they’ve come up many times here on the blog. The basic idea is simple: you build up a set of small molecules with some relatively simple synthetic steps, with plenty of branching at each stage. As a thought experiment, this… Read More
With all of my posts here about vaccines and antibodies, it’s only fair that I spend some time talking about the potential toxicology problems with both of those. I remain optimistic about both categories, but it’s for sure that not all the candidates being advanced are going to make it through. So what sorts of… Read More
So let’s do a non-coronavirus post for the weekend. Over the years, I’ve sporadically reported on the (rather contentious) field of aging and its biochemical implications. Many readers will recall the results of the past few years that claim that infusion of young-animal plasma into aged animals seems to have many beneficial effects. Of… Read More
Since I did a monoclonal antibody update in the last post, here’s one on the vaccine front, where there is a lot of news – and where there are a lot of issues coming up similar to the ones with the antibodies as well. The last vaccine update post was here. What we’re seeing now… Read More
There’s a lot of interesting antibody news to catch up on, from the early science to clinical trials. A previous post on this subject is here, with links to earlier background explanations, if you would like to catch up on the area. Here, for example, is a report from a large multi-center team in China characterizing… Read More
Many chemists will by now be aware of the brief, but very loud, incident with Angewandte Chemie and a paper by Tomas Hudlicky that appeared there. Well, it didn’t appear for long – within hours, the link had disappeared. The article appears to have been an update of parts of his book “The Way of… Read More
The recent implosion of the Surgisphere data papers has been big news. It included one that purported to show no benefit (and actual harm) from hydroxychloroquine treatment, and even more harm when combined with azithromycin – but since the authors have been unable to back up the raw data on this, the paper cannot be… Read More
