/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derekb.lowe@gmail.com 2013-04-18T11:53:29-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/18/a_short_peptide_and_a_small_molecule.php Just as a quick example of how odd molecular recognition can be, have a look at this paper from Chemical Communications. It's not particularly remarkable, but it's a good example of what's possible. The authors used a commercial phage display... 76352@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2013-04-18T11:53:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/01/chemical_probes_versus_drugs.php Nature Chemical Biology has an entire issue on target selection and target validation, and it looks well worth a read. I'll have more to say about some of the articles in it, but I wanted to mention a point that... 76314@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2013-04-01T06:00:00-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/27/the_dnaencoded_library_platform_yields_a_hit.php I wrote here about DNA-barcoding of huge (massively, crazily huge) combichem libraries, a technology that apparently works, although one can think of a lot of reasons why it shouldn't. This is something that GlaxoSmithKline bought by acquiring Praecis some years... 76307@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2013-03-27T10:47:18-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/20/using_dna_to_make_your_polymers_no_enzymes_needed.php Here's an ingenious use for DNA that never would have occurred to me. David Liu and co-workers have been using DNA-templated reactions for some time, though, so it's the sort of thing that would have occurred to them: using the... 76291@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2013-03-20T07:54:06-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/27/selective_inhibitor_the_catalog_says.php There's an interesting addendum to yesterday's post about natural product fragments. Dan Erlanson was pointing out that many of the proposed fragments were PAINS, and that prompted Jonathan Baell (author of the original PAINS paper) to leave a comment there... 76242@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2013-02-27T07:54:58-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/01/so_how_does_one_grow_betacells.php The short answer is "by looking for compounds that grow beta cells". That's the subject of this paper, a collaboration between Peter Schulz's group, the Novartis GNF. Schultz's group has already published on cell-based phenotypic screens in this area, where... 76185@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2013-02-01T08:18:18-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/01/17/halogen_bonds.php Here's a recent paper in J. Med. Chem. on halogen bonding in medicinal chemistry. I find the topic interesting, because it's an effect that certainly appears to be real, but is rarely (if ever) exploited in any kind of systematic... 76145@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2013-01-17T11:59:01-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/12/19/more_on_the_parabon_nsf_press_release.php Well, I've been away from the computer a good part of the day, but I return to find that the author of the NSF press release that I spoke unkindly of has shown up in the comments to that post.... 76085@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Press Coverage 2012-12-19T08:52:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/12/18/parabons_dna_structures_what_the_hey.php I'm having a real problem understanding this press release from the NSF. I've been looking at it for a few days now (it's been sent to me a couple of times in e-mail), and I still can't get a handle... 76081@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2012-12-18T11:29:00-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/12/17/stapled_peptides_take_a_torpedo.php I wrote here about "stapled peptides", which are small modified helical proteins. They've had their helices stabilized by good ol' organic synthesis, with artificial molecular bridging between the loops. There are several ways to do this, but they all seem... 76078@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2012-12-17T11:15:25-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/26/an_engineered_rhodiumenzyme_catalyst.php I don't know how many readers have been following this, but there's been some interesting work over the last few years in using streptavidin (a protein that's an old friend of chemical biologists everywhere) as a platform for new catalyst... 76022@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical Biology 2012-11-26T07:23:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/15/a_good_example_of_phenotypic_screening.php I like to highlight phenotypic screening efforts here sometimes, because there's evidence that they can lead to drugs at a higher-than-usual rate. And who couldn't use some of that? Here's a new example from a team at the Broad Institute.... 75999@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cancer 2012-11-15T07:18:17-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/08/picosecond_protein_watching.php We're getting closer to real-time X-ray structures of protein function, and I think I speak for a lot of chemists and biologists when I say that this has been a longstanding dream. X-ray structures, when they work well, can give... 75986@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2012-11-08T08:23:17-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/10/30/jq1_giving_up_a_fortune.php The Atlantic is out with a list of "Brave Thinkers", and one of them is Jay Bradner at Harvard Medical School. He's on there for JQ1, a small-molecule bromodomain ligand that was reported in 2010. (I note, in passing, that... 75970@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Patents and IP 2012-10-30T08:48:57-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/10/17/zafgens_epoxide_adventure.php Zafgen is a startup in the Boston area that's working on a novel weight-loss drug called beloranib. Their initial idea was that they were inhibiting angiogenesis in adipose tissue, through inhibition of methionine aminopeptidase-2. But closer study showed that while... 75937@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2012-10-17T06:38:19-05:00