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.
One side effect of the coronavirus has been an explosion of lower-quality publications in the scientific literature. This has come in several forms, some more excusable than others. In the former category are the papers that were rushed out earlier this year, observational studies that sometimes investigated possible therapies as well. These were o… Read More
I wanted to mention something that was reported a week or so ago, and may sound a bit exotic or obscure, if you’re not a structural biologist. But it’s yet another sign of a revolution in our ability to get structures of biomolecules (and others) that we never would have before, and the effects over… Read More
We have a new paper in the NEJM from the Eli Lilly effort on monoclonal antibodies against the coronavirus. And there’s no reason not to be up front about it: it’s disappointing. This is the BLAZE-1 trial (mentioned in this recent post), which is studying non-hospitalized patients. It was another trial (ACTIV-3) where this antibody… Read More
So here’s an ambitious idea that’s about to get a hearing in human clinical trials. A startup called Shasqi is using click chemistry as a drug delivery method, and they have a new manuscript on the idea here at ChemRxiv. The idea is this: you produce a modified version of a hyaluronate biopolymer, decorated with… Read More
Unfortunately, we’re getting a dose these days of “That’s why you run clinical trials”. Word came Monday evening (Peter Loftus in the WSJ, and a Lilly statement) that the ACTIV-3 trial being run by the NIH has shown lack of efficacy for the combination of the Eli Lilly/AbCellera anti-coronavirus antibody (bamlanivimab, LY-Co… Read More
I was speaking to a university audience the other day (over Zoom, of course) and as I often do I mentioned the studies that have looked at what kinds of reactions medicinal chemists actually use. The cliché is that we spend most of our time doing things like metal-catalyzed couplings and amide formation, and well… Read More
We’re getting closer to having to deal with a number of tricky issues around the first Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for coronavirus vaccines. These have never quite come up in this way before, because (for one thing) EUAs for vaccines are relatively rare events, and (for another) we’ve never had so many simultaneous vaccine trial… Read More
Here’s a new paper in Nature on computer-generated synthesis of natural products. More formally, you’d call it retrosynthesis, since the thought process in organic chemistry tends to work backwards when you have a particular target that you’re trying to make: “OK, this part could could be made from something like this. . .an… Read More
OK, we have some more to think about this morning. The large SOLIDARITY trial from the WHO has reported more interim data on its investigation into repurposed drugs for the coronavirus pandemic. And some of this we already knew, but some of it’s a real surprise. One drug reported on is hydroxychloroquine. This showed no… Read More
For months now, people have been watching closely to see if it’s possible to get re-infected with the coronavirus. It’s taken a while for the signal-to-noise to get better, but by now there’s no doubt that the answer is yes, it’s possible. We’ve just had the first of these in the US, a man in… Read More
