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.
Layer upon layer! That’s what cell biology provides you with – just when you think you understand some area of it, things turn out to be more complex. I’m going on in this mode after looking over this new preprint from the Bertozzi lab at Stanford, which uncovers a new class of biomolecules that no… Read More
To what extent can scientific discovery be automated? Where are the areas where automation can make the biggest contribution to human efforts? These questions and a number of others are addressed in a very interesting two-part review article on “Automated Discovery in the Chemical Sciences”. The authors, from MIT, are well-equipped (in… Read More
This new paper shows one reason why it’s so tricky to calculate compound binding in an active site (which is what we’d want to do in order to do effective in silico virtual screening). The authors (a multicenter team from York, Demuris, Vernalis, and St. Jude) are looking at a virulence protein from H. influenzae… Read More
There were some headlines the other day about the “first AI-discovered drug”, so that should send us to the work in question to see what’s going on. The company in question is called Deep Genomics, and here’s what its founder has to say: “Making drugs has traditionally been a gambling game. Big Pharma is throwing… Read More
Blog Housekeeping
I have a lot of interesting topics backed up ready to go, but unfortunately there’s been too much going on today for a full blog post. I’ll see everyone on Monday! Read More
There are a lot of clinical trial designs out there. But one thing that a lot of them have in common is that they are designed right from the start to run under certain set conditions and to enroll a set number of people (or at least to meet certain thresholds before that enrollment is… Read More
One of the reasons that people in or near this business can write such gaudy press releases is that it has so many moving parts. That lets everyone claim that the part that they’re addressing is Crucial. Think of a car: the wheels are indeed key to mobility, but so is the engine. As is… Read More
I’ve said this before, but if I had to pick one general feature of the current scientific literature versus that of (say) 30 years ago, I would vote for the ability to obtain data at far smaller scales (higher resolution) and the corresponding ability to more fully characterize structures and species that are far larger… Read More
In case you don’t know, there’s officially an effort to try to develop chemical probes for basically every protein in the human proteome. The “Target 2035” initiative has been looking through the literature and finding what you’d expect: power-law distributions that have most people working on proteins that other peopl… Read More
OK, today’s blog post is going to be even weirder than usual – we’re going to wander off into quantum mechanics. And into a particular borderland of it where have been a lot of interesting hypotheses and speculations, but plenty of hand-waving hoo-hah, so it’s important to realize the risks up front. But here we go. Read More
