Industrial chemistry time! Let's stipulate that the world's chemical feedstock industries, on the whole, are not what you would describe as environmentally friendly. There are a lot of moving parts, and some of them are definitely better than others (in their use of energy, carbo … | Continue reading
This is a neat article at Bloomberg about the production of botulinum toxin (BTX, aka Botox). This is a drug that has some rather special handling involved:A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year. That little bit is der … | Continue reading
In a comment to my post on putting out fires last week, one commenter mentioned the utility of the good old sand bucket, and wondered if there was anything that would go on to set the sand on fire. Thanks to a note from reader Robert L., I can report that there is indeed such a r … | Continue reading
Here's a fascinating paper (PDF) that's not exactly chemistry-related (well, not directly) but definitely has some relevance to a person's everyday work life in the sciences. The authors are using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaire, ad … | Continue reading
STAT is reporting that IBM has stopped trying to sell their "Watson for Drug Discovery" machine learning/AI tool, according to sources within the company. I have no reason to doubt that - in fact, I've sort of been expecting it. But no one seems to have told IBM's website program … | Continue reading
I suppose I deserve this one. Some years ago on the blog, I wrote about my days in grad school having to learn about symmetries and vibrational spectroscopy. Sparingly has that knowledge come in handy since then, but the course is still a vivid memory for me, since that's the cle … | Continue reading
Well, there it is. Biogen and Eisai have announced just this morning that they're halting Phase III trials of aducanumab, their anti-amyloid antibody, after the monitoring committee judged that further treatment would be futile.I'm not going to do some sort of victory dance, beca … | Continue reading
There have been some pretty dramatic clinical trial results coming out recently, and unfortunately drama is a variable that can take either a positive or a negative sign in front of it. On the plus side, MacroGenix, a company that not many people had been paying attention to, ann … | Continue reading
There have been several hearings in Washington on the drug industry and drug prices, and there are going to be more. Drug pricing is a large and messy issue, for sure, and all I'll say about it today is to ask everyone to read Jack Scannell on it before expressing an opinion. I'm … | Continue reading
Here's a strongly opinionated look at where the "precision medicine" field is these days, and I think that this is just the sort of article that the field (and the journalists covering it) need to see, whether you agree with it or not:In 1999 Francis Collins published a foundatio … | Continue reading
We have another entry in the "Is Alzheimer's caused by infectious disease?" drawing, and it's a good one. A large multicenter team reports that Porphyromonas gingivalis, which is the key pathogen in gingivitis (gum disease) may be the actual causative agent in Alzheimer's, which … | Continue reading
We have another entry in the "Is Alzheimer's caused by infectious disease?" drawing, and it's a good one. A large multicenter team reports that Porphyromonas gingivalis, which is the key pathogen in gingivitis (gum disease) may be the actual causative agent in Alzheimer's, which … | Continue reading
It's a truism among metabolic researchers that if you could find a drug that simulates the effects of exercise you would be very happy with the market for it. But what causes the effects of exercise? That's one of those simple questions that members of the general public might th … | Continue reading
Microbiome, microbiome - you haven't been able to turn around in this business the last few years without hitting some sort of story about the microbiome. It's easy to roll your eyes and decide that it's all hype, but that's the thing: it really is important. It can't be dismisse … | Continue reading
I have some blogging topics queued up (as is generally the case) but I can't resist this one, which showed up in my Twitter feed this morning. It's an update from Rupert Pennant-Rea in the UK - former editor of The Economist, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, and man … | Continue reading
The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I'm always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous co … | Continue reading
I have some blogging topics queued up (as is generally the case) but I can't resist this one, which showed up in my Twitter feed this morning. It's an update from Rupert Pennant-Rea in the UK - former editor of The Economist, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, and man … | Continue reading
How much can we improve on Nature? Fixing defective proteins and pathways is one thing, but in those cases we're trying to get back to what the function should be (and what it is in healthy organisms). But what about "better than healthy"? That's a tricky area to enter, because ( … | Continue reading
There's a chemical contamination story in the generic drug industry that just isn't going away. Late last summer, some lots of valsartan were recalled due to detection of N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), and the problem has just continued since then. We'll get into the chemistry of … | Continue reading
Unfortunately, it's time to talk transmissible protein pathology again. That's the unnerving idea that misfolded proteins can, under some conditions, act as infectious agents (prions are the most famous examples and the most widely-used name for these). I wrote in 2015 about a pa … | Continue reading
The pileup in immuno-oncology is already the stuff of legend: it's difficult to even count the number of therapies, combinations, and clinical trials that are underway or in development. And that's for good reason, of course - the promise here is huge, the field is wide open, and … | Continue reading
Time for another look at AbbVie's work on Rova-T (an antibody-drug conjugate targeting the tumor antigen DLL3), and for some hard thoughts about what drug development is really like. The last time I wrote about this program, things didn't look good. Now they look even worse. A Ph … | Continue reading
Are there CRISPR-modified human babies now or not? I was waiting to write about this story in hope that it might get a little more clear, but so far that doesn't seem to be happening. So here we go. What we know so far is that He Jiankui, a researcher from Shenzhan's Southern Uni … | Continue reading
Let the machine learning wars commence! That's my impression on reading over the situation I'm detailing today, at any rate. This one starts with this paper in Science, a joint effort by the Doyle group at Princeton and Merck, which used ML techniques to try to predict the succes … | Continue reading
Let the machine learning wars commence! That's my impression on reading over the situation I'm detailing today, at any rate. This one starts with this paper in Science, a joint effort by the Doyle group at Princeton and Merck, which used ML techniques to try to predict the succes … | Continue reading
Any article titled "How to Engineer Biology" is going to get a look from me - and when I'm referenced in the opening paragraphs, especially so. This is a piece by Vijay Pande in Scientific American, and I get called out for my naming of the "Andy Grove Fallacy" (found in this pos … | Continue reading
The intersection between Silicon-Valley-style tech and biotech is getting a lot of attention these days. Some of it looks like it could be a productive synthesis: 23andMe hiring Richard Scheller of Genentech (update: and Robert Gentleman, today) as it starts its own efforts in dr … | Continue reading
Via Chemjobber's Twitter account comes a link to a really interesting Wall Street Journal story on a chemical approach to things like wine and whiskey (last explored here in this 2015 post). The startup company involved, Endless West, began by looking at the constituents of vario … | Continue reading
There have been some potentially significant developments in Parkinson's disease, which is a good thing to be able to report. As populations age around the world, PD has been on its way up, but therapies for it have not been, despite a good deal of work in the field. But it looks … | Continue reading
I'm traveling, so there's a bit less time for blogging than usual. But I wanted to mention something that's come up several times over the years, especially when new technologies are coming along. People ask me "Do you think that (such-and-such) is going to be important?" or "Can … | Continue reading
OK, the "Silicon Valley Meets Biotech" subject has come up around here numerous times, most recently here, about a startup out of YCombinator called Verge Genomics. But several people have called my attention to this proposal over at (yes) YCombinator, so by gosh, it's coming up … | Continue reading
Word has been spreading rapidly about this preprint on Chemrxiv.org, from a joint UCLA/Caltech team. It details the use of the cryo-electron microscopy technique called micro-electron diffraction (MicroED) for the structure determination of small molecules, and it's absolutely st … | Continue reading
Since I was going on yesterday about the need to validate tool reagents, I wanted to note that this problem is not confined to biochemical applications. Here's an article looking at commercial sources of graphene, the carbon monolayer material that's been the subject of so much r … | Continue reading
This paper is really a tour de force of analytical chemistry, because it does something that I didn't think was possible. The team is looking at a rather ancient creature, Dickinsonia. In fact, you could argue that it's the ancient creature, since it's one of the Ediacaran organi … | Continue reading
There are a lot of cancer cell lines out there, and many of them get used a lot, too. It's not surprising, in a way, because these are cells that have already (and unfortunately) proven themselves to be robust and fast-growing, so many of these lines tend to take to cell culture … | Continue reading
The whole machine learning field has a huge amount to offer chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biomedical science in general. I don’t think that anyone seriously disputes that part - the arguing starts when you ask when this promise might be realized. In the abstract, the idea o … | Continue reading
Well, the tease is over: Biogen and Eisai have released data on their Alzheimer's antibody, BAN2401. And the situation is messy, as many had feared. The top-line results are mostly positive, but there are several confounding factors that make them a matter of argument (see below) … | Continue reading
It's a Friday in midsummer, so I assume that a fair percentage of the readership is not even around! So I'm not going to do a huge detailed blog post (got one of those coming on Monday, actually). Today I just wanted to go on a bit about a problem that comes with experience in th … | Continue reading
A number of people have passed along the recent press stories about Verge Genomics, a new company out of YCombinator that has just raised $32 million for neuroscience drug discovery. Now that, as literally anyone who's ever done it can tell you, is a hard field of a hard field, a … | Continue reading
I've written a couple of times over the years about the idea that Alzheimer's disease might have an infectious component to it. That's been proposed many times, but it's fair to say that it's never caught on. For one thing, the amyloid hypothesis has always had a lot more going f … | Continue reading
If this works out, it's something that people have been trying to find for a long time: what exactly are the genetic/biochemical vulnerabilities that make a person susceptible to alcoholism? It's long been suspected that there must be some, but untangling these things from sheer … | Continue reading
There have been all sorts of scientific scandals involving faked journal articles, faked peer reviews, duplicated papers and figures, etc. over the last few years. It's been a running battle: our current technologies allow for these things to be done more easily, but caught more … | Continue reading
I wrote a couple of months ago about the disappointing results that AbbVie had obtained with their cancer stem cell therapy "Rova-T" (rovalpituzumab tesirine) in small-cell lung cancer. This was the antibody-drug conjugate that they'd purchased from Stemcentryx - OK, let's clarif … | Continue reading
Cadmium is bad news. Lead and mercury get all the press, but cadmium is just as foul, even if far fewer people encounter it. Never in my career have I had any occasion to use any, and I like it that way. There was an organocadmium reaction in my textbook when I took sophomore org … | Continue reading
This piece in Science says something that needs to be said louder and more publicly. If you live in the US, you've surely seen various cancer treatment centers talking about their personalized therapy plans, and especially how they'll tailor things to your DNA sequence and so on. … | Continue reading
Derek Lowe’s commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. | Continue reading