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.
We’re starting to see some clinical trial data on possible Covid-19 therapies, specifically some of the ones mentioned in this earlier post on small-molecule approaches. First, the bad news (although I have to say it’s not unexpected). A trial of the lopinavir/ritonavir combination has shown no benefit. I say “not unexpected”… Read More
There’s quite a bit of confusion around the ACE proteins and coronavirus infection, and I can see why. The names in this area are pretty confusing, for one thing, and if you’re not familiar with the tangled feedback loops that you get in human biology, it all starts to look like a tangle of wires… Read More
The German newspaper Welt am Sonntag has reported that the Trump administration has been making overtures to the German vaccine company Curevac. Here’s the part that’s really making headlines (my translation below): Der US-Präsident bietet der deutschen Firma angeblich einen hohen Betrag, um sich ihre Arbeit zu sichern. Von einer Milli… Read More
I think I’m going to be dividing the blog posts into two categories for the time being: coronavirus-related ones and completely nonrelated ones. It’s the biggest medical story right now – this one’s going into the history books, unfortunately – so I can’t pretend to ignore it. But neither can I go all-coronavirus… Read More
Well, biology is marching on, even outside the virology that’s on all of our minds. Have a look at this paper, which is looking at the very small proteins I last wrote about here. (Here’s a commentary on this new work as well). What we’re seeing is yet more strong evidence for such species being… Read More
I can tell that the current events are getting a bit overwhelming by the difficulty of writing about other topics here! I’m not specifically on a coronavirus topic today, but rather on what some of the news coverage is saying about our expectations for medical research. One of the things people have noted about my… Read More
Friday I looked over the small-molecule landscape in this post, which has been updated and will continue to be as more news comes along. Today let’s look at the biologics landscape. One thing that I want to emphasize up front, as I did in the earlier post, is that none of these things are available… Read More
Update: for clinical trial results as of March 18 on some of these, see here). Let’s take inventory on the therapies that are being developed for the coronavirus epidemic. Here is a very thorough list of at Biocentury, and I should note that (like Stat and several other organizations) they’re making all their Covid-19 content free… Read More
I know that antiviral news is all the thing these days (post coming on that tomorrow), but there’s some encouraging antibacterial news as well, which we could always use. This paper reports progress in the cationic antimicrobial peptide (AMP) area. That’s been a field of interest for a long time, but it’s been tough. Update: Read More
