/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-07-16T07:52:08-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/16/receptors_cant_live_with_em_cant_understand_em.php At various points in my drug discovery career, I’ve worked on G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) targets. Most everyone in the drug industry has at some point – a significant fraction of the known drugs work through them, even though we have... 73443@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-07-16T07:52:08-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/22/killing_proteins_wholesale.php Benjamin Cravatt at Scripps has another interesting paper out this week – by my standards, he hasn’t published very many dull ones. I spoke about some earlier work of his here, where his group tried to profile enzymes in living... 73326@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-05-22T06:31:04-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/19/empty_as_can_be.php OK, drugs generally bind to some sort of cavity in a protein. So what’s in that cavity when the drug isn’t there? Well, sometimes it’s the substance that the drug is trying to mimic or block, the body’s own ligand... 73320@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-05-19T07:55:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/16/nanotech_stem_cells_order_now.php A good rule to follow: hold onto your wallet when two exciting, complicated fields of research are combined. Nature reported earlier this spring on a good example of this, the announcement by a small biotech called Primegen that they'd used... 73312@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-05-16T07:26:01-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/03/28/rna_interference_even_trickier_than_you_thought.php It’s been a while since I talked about RNA interference here. It’s still one of those tremendously promising therapeutic ideas, and it’s still having a tremendously hard time proving itself. Small RNA molecules can do all sorts of interesting and... 73188@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-03-28T08:00:15-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/14/getting_real_with_real_cells.php I’ve been reading an interesting paper from JACS with the catchy title of “Optimization of Activity-Based Probes for Proteomic Profiling of Histone Deacetylase Complexes”. This is work from Benjamin Cravatt's lab at Scripps, and it says something about me, I... 73111@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2008-02-14T08:28:28-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/01/08/rainbows_and_fishing_expeditions.php I came across a neat article in Nature from a group working on a new technique in neuroscience imaging. They expressed an array of four differently colored fluorescent proteins in developing neurons in vivo, and placed them so that recombination... 73006@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Central Nervous System 2008-01-08T08:37:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/12/05/avandia_going_under_for_the_third_time.php How many hits can a drug – or a whole class of drugs – take? Avandia (rosiglitazone) has been the subject of much wrangling about cardiovascular risk in its patient population of Type II diabetics. But there have also been... 72920@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2007-12-05T21:32:49-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/11/11/a_real_genetic_headscratcher.php As you root through genomic sequences - and there are more and more of them to root through these days - you come across some stretches of DNA that hardly seem to vary at all. The hard-core "ultraconserved" parts, first... 72854@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2007-11-11T15:55:25-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/29/what_we_dont_know_about_enzymes.php There was an intriguing paper published earlier this month from Manfred Reetz and co-workers at the Max Planck Institute. It's not only an interesting finding, but a good example of making lemonade from lemons. They were looking at an enzyme... 72814@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2007-10-29T20:12:40-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/15/checking_the_numbers_on_the_alzheimers_test.php The news of a possible diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease is very interesting, although there’s always room to wonder about the utility of a diagnosis of a disease for which there is little effective therapy. The sample size for this... 72780@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2007-10-15T20:30:14-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/11/let_us_now_turn_to_the_example_of_yo_mama.php Now we open the sedate, learned pages of Nature Methods, a fine journal that specializes in new techniques in molecular and chemical biology. In the August issue, the correspondence section features. . .well, a testy response to a paper that... 72769@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Scientific Literature 2007-10-11T07:34:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/09/06/more_things_than_are_dreamt_of.php It’s useful to be reminded every so often of how much you don’t know. There’s a new paper in PNAS that’ll do that for a number of its readers. The authors report a new protein, one of the iron-sulfur binding... 72667@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2007-09-06T05:51:10-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/07/17/visfatin_real_or_not.php A commentor to my Proteomics 101 post the other day brought up an important point: that before you can have a chance to figure out what a protein is doing, you have to know that it exists. Finding the darn... 72499@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2007-07-17T19:44:33-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/11/06/it_went_up_instead_of_down.php One of the things I like most about science is that you really don't know what's going to happen next. That's especially true in the areas where things have just barely settled down. Before that, when a field is new,... 68694@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2006-11-06T20:47:37-05:00