/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2010-03-01T09:07:36-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/03/01/calorimetry_what_say_you.php I've been involved in a mailing list discussion that I wanted to open up to a wider audience in drug discovery, so here goes. We spend our time (well, a lot of it, when we're not filling out forms) trying... 74303@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2010-03-01T09:07:36-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/27/sequenom_strike_up_the_music_bring_on_the_cream_pies.php Now here's a weird one. The San Diego diagnostics company Sequenom came up with a non-invasive test for Down's Syndrome, and sold it to another outfit, Xenomics, for development. Update: I've got this transfer backwards - Xenomics licensed some of... 74241@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Dark Side 2010-01-27T07:16:55-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/26/the_infinitely_active_impurity.php Yesterday's post touched on something that all experienced drug discovery people have been through: the compound that works - until a new batch is made. Then it doesn't work so well. What to do? You have a fork in the... 74238@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2010-01-26T08:29:04-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/11/sure_about_that.php There was a natural products paper (abstract) that I missed last fall which has finally come out in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Let's have a show of hands: how many chemists out there think that this structure is the... 74211@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2010-01-11T12:04:47-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/05/run_it_past_the_chemists.php I missed this paper when it came out back in October: "Reactome Array: Forging a Link Between Metabolome and Genome". I'd like to imagine that it was the ome-heavy title itself that drove me away, but I have to admit... 74199@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Scientific Literature 2010-01-05T07:27:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/12/22/ge_healthcares_idiotic_libel_suit.php Courtesy of Pharmalot (and my mail!), I note this alarming story from London. GE Healthcare makes a medical NMR contrast agent, a gadolinium complex marketed under the name of Omniscan. (They picked it up when they bought Amersham a few... 74192@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2009-12-22T10:49:44-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/12/21/faking_xray_structures_for_fun_or_profit_or_what.php Well, this isn't good: an ex-researcher at the University of Alabama-Birmingham has been accused of faking several X-ray structures of useful proteins - dengue virus protease, taq polymerase, complement proteins from immunology, etc. There have been questions surrounding H. M.... 74191@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Dark Side 2009-12-21T09:33:03-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/12/09/water_and_proteins_inside_cells_sloshing_around_or_not.php Back in September, talking about the insides of cells, I said: There's not a lot of bulk water sloshing around in there. It's all stuck to and sliding around with enzymes, structural proteins, carbohydrates, and the like. . ." But... 74176@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Analytical Chemistry 2009-12-09T08:45:07-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/11/30/more_binding_site_weirdness.php Now here's an oddity: medicinal chemists are used to seeing the two enantiomers (mirror image compounds, for those outside the field) showing different activity. After all, proteins are chiral, and can recognize such things - in fact, it's a bit... 74164@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2009-11-30T12:23:31-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/10/07/a_nobel_for_ribosome_structure.php This was another Biology-for-Chemistry year for the Nobel Committee. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Cambridge), Thomas Steitz (Yale) and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Inst.) have won for X-ray crystallographic studies of the ribosome. Ribosomes are indeed significant, to put it lightly. For those outside... 74087@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-10-07T07:36:09-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/03/06/tie_me_molecule_down_sport.php There are a huge number of techniques in the protein world that relay on tying down some binding partner onto some kind of solid support. When you’re talking about immobilizing proteins, that’s one thing – they’re large beasts, and presumably... 73771@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2009-03-06T08:19:07-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/01/22/the_great_acetonitrile_shortage.php Now here’s a news item that I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard about unless you work in or near a laboratory. We’re in the middle of an extreme shortage of acetonitrile, a common solvent. This has been going on since... 73696@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2009-01-22T08:31:06-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/10/09/more_glowing_cells_chemistry_comes_through_again.php I’ve spoken before about the acetylene-azide “click” reaction popularized by Barry Sharpless and his co-workers out at Scripps. This has been taken up by the chemical biology field in a big way, and all sorts of ingenious applications are starting... 73572@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-10-09T08:00:46-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/09/23/you_call_that_an_xray_source.php Over the years, when some puzzling feature of a drug candidate’s binding to a target came up, I’ve often said “Well, we’re not going to know what’s happening until some lunatic builds a femtosecond X-ray laser”. Various lunatics are now... 73548@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Analytical Chemistry 2008-09-23T07:10:04-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/09/04/xray_structures_handle_with_care.php X-ray crystallography is wonderful stuff – I think you’ll get chemists to generally agree on that. There’s no other technique that can provide such certainty about the structure of a compound – and for medicinal chemists, it has the invaluable... 73528@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Analytical Chemistry 2008-09-04T07:41:13-05:00