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.
I’ve written several times here about phase-separated condensates in cells, but now comes a rarity: a paper with some evidence for a therapeutic application. Everyone in the field has been thinking along such lines, naturally, but this is the first small-molecule screen that I’ve seen that tries to tie modifying condensate behavior in t… Read More
Here’s a new look at the various ways that small molecules can affect a well-known drug target (the estrogen receptor) and it shows us that we’re all going to have to look at these things more carefully than we do. Now, to be fair, the ER is already fairly complicated, because it’s a nuclear receptor. Read More
I’m sure that I’m not alone in getting emails like the one I got yesterday, and I get them reasonably often. Out of the blue, I hear from someone finishing up a degree at an obscure (to me) Indian university. In this latest case, the person writing doesn’t even get around to telling me which… Read More
Here’s a ring system that you’ve never used before – the cyclopropyl system in purple at the end of the row in the diagram at right. It’s described in this paper from GSK-Stevenage as a new morpholine isostere. A 4-morpholino-pyrimidine hinge binder core is preferred in many PI3K and PIKK inhibitors, but the team was… Read More
How much does scientific publication matter? For once, we’re not going to be talking about its role in academia (partly because it obviously means quite a bit there!) No, how much does it matter in industry? Specifically, at highly valued biomedical startups? That’s the subject of this new paper by John Ioannides and co-authors, and… Read More
This is a pretty interesting paper on several levels. It sheds light on Mucin I kidney disease (MKD), on protein degradation pathways (a hot topic these days, as those in the industry well know), and it also provides a small molecule lead compound. It’s a large multicenter team, starting off with the Broad Institute, but… Read More
I wrote here about a new company (Homology Medicine) that claimed to have a viral method for gene editing that did not involve any sort of double-strand DNA breaking enzyme (as you need during the CRISPR, TALENs, or zinc-finger nuclease methods). That’s a pretty interesting claim, because double-strand breaks (DSBs) are powerful but can be… Read More
Many folks outside of this industry don’t realize that the FDA sends inspectors to drug manufacturing facilities in other countries. That might sound a bit odd, but agreeing to such inspections is in fact a condition of being able to sell pharmaceutical substances in the US (or to supply other companies that do). It’s a… Read More
I’ve written here about phase-separated condensates inside cells, and the publications on these continue to show up all over the literature. I found this recent one in Science to be particularly interesting, on several levels. One thing the condensate idea has given a framework to is the variety of small cellular structures that have been… Read More
This article, from Nature‘s Careers section, has a lot of sound advice for people making it through graduate school. It’s presented as a list of things not to do, and I would agree with all of them. And I think that most anyone who’s been through the experience would as well. Among these is an… Read More
