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.
And now we have more data on the CanSino vaccine, another adenovirus vector (but this one using Ad5, a much more common one in the human population). Their initial Phase I data are discussed here. So what else do we know now? Well, that one was open label and non-randomized, whereas this one is fully controlled. Read More
The hype began building late last week around the Oxford vaccine results released today, and I will confess to wondering just what was going on. The British press has a history of going berserk over drug research – I wouldn’t care to count how many times Alzheimer’s “breakthroughs” have hit the headlines over there, an… Read More
Recent posts here have gone into Moderna’s Phase I vaccine data, Pfizer’s Phase I vaccine data, what we don’t know yet about the relationship between T-cells, antibodies, and immunity to the coronavirus, and some new data that are starting to fill in those gaps. This morning comes a new preprint from the Pfizer/BioNTech team that… Read More
Well, I was writing just the other day about what we don’t know about the T-cell response to coronavirus infection, and as of today we know quite a bit more. And from what I can see, we have encouraging news, mixed with some things that we’re going to need to keep an eye on. Here’s… Read More
Well, it’s finally here – eight weeks to the day after press-releasing some top line results, the full paper is out on the Moderna mRNA vaccine candidate’s Phase I trial. I’m very glad to see it – it’s going to be very important for the full data sets on all the vaccine candidates to be… Read More
I wanted to point out an interesting interview given by Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla to Time. I have made some pointed remarks about Pfizer over the years, but this is one of the better Q&A pieces like this that I have seen – you’ll see why in some of the answers below. Bourla is actually… Read More
So let’s talk robotic chemistry experimentation – that always calms everyone right down, doesn’t it? This new paper in Nature from a group in Liverpool is (at heart) a pretty straightforward implementation of modern reaction optimization, with the added feature that it’s being done by a mobile robot, rolling around the lab… Read More
Let’s talk about some details that might sound small or even ridiculous, but (as you’ll see) they’re just the sorts of things that you have to worry about at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and physics. That makes it sound like I’m going to be going into something really high-tech here, but you be the… Read More
I wrote here about the reports of rather short antibody persistence in recovering coronavirus patients, and what’s been coming out in the two weeks since then has only made this issue more important. In that post, I was emphasizing that although we can measure antibody levels, we don’t know how well that correlates with exposure… Read More
I realize that I’ve picked up a lot of new traffic to the blog over the last few months, so today’s post perhaps needs some introduction. Over the years here I’ve often posted recipes during breaks and holidays – the old saying is that you should never trust an organic chemist who can’t cook, and… Read More
