/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-07-31T07:13:56-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/31/rember_for_alzheimers_methylene_blues_comeback.php Today we take up the extremely interesting story of Rember, hailed in this week’s press as a potential wonder drug for Alzheimer’s. There are a lot of unusual features to this one. To take the most obvious first, the Phase... 73478@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Alzheimer's Disease 2008-07-31T07:13:56-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/29/iloperidone_a_schizophrenia_drug_goes_down_for_the_last_time.php I've talked about a lot of difficult therapeutic areas, but here's another boulevard of broken dreams: schizophrenia drugs. I was working on follow-ups to a promising clincial candidate, which has since been promising a number of times without ever delivering.... 73473@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Central Nervous System 2008-07-29T07:39:09-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/22/vytorin_another_round_of_nasty_results.php Merck took the unusual step of delaying its earnings release yesterday until after the close of the market. A report on another clinical study of Vytorin (ezetimibe), their drug with Schering-Plough, was coming out, so they put the numbers on... 73455@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-07-22T08:08:24-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/08/glaxo_asks_the_eurocrats.php There was a story yesterday about GlaxoSmithKline taking what’s being called an unusual step to prioritize their clinical candidates. According to the Wall Street Journal, they invited officials from the national health care plans of several European countries to a... 73427@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Regulatory Affairs 2008-07-08T08:07:49-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/30/another_alzheimers_compound_goes_down.php I was mentioning the gamma secretase enzyme around here just the other day as a longstanding target for Alzheimer's therapy. I remember the periodduring the 1990s when the enzyme hadn't been identified yet, and frankly, it was a lot easier... 73403@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Alzheimer's Disease 2008-06-30T07:25:12-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/16/fun_with_bacteria.php A recent interview in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery with John Powers, formerly of the FDA, points out some problems in designing antibacterial drug trials. Some of these are unique to this area, although others we're stuck with wherever we go.... 73233@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2008-04-16T07:19:54-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/09/and_you_thought_exubera_was_a_disaster_before.php I don't usually do more than one post a day, but this really caught my eye. In an ongoing review of Pfizer's (now discontinued) inhaled insulin (Exubera), an increased chance of lung cancer has turned up among participants in the... 73218@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2008-04-09T10:35:32-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/04/another_cholesterol_medication_goes_down_or_does_it.php This is turning into Cardiovascular Week around the blog, I have to say, and not in a good way. The latest news is the failure of a drug candidate from Takeda, TAK-475 (lapaquistat). They were in the lead in the... 73211@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-04-04T07:53:39-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/01/vytorin_its_a_pity.php Ezetimibe, known as Zetia and as the key component of Vytorin, was invented by friends and colleagues of mine. It was the first drug I ever saw discovered after I joined the drug industry. The initial discovery of the whole... 73200@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-04-01T07:17:35-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/03/17/you_get_what_you_pay_for.php I'm a bit under the weather today, so this one will be short. Since we were talking about CNS drugs and clinical trials the other day, I thought I'd mention this article from Neuropsychopharmacology. The authors compare reported trials of... 73164@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Clinical Trials 2008-03-17T09:16:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/03/12/taranabant_in_trouble.php Well, I wish I hadn’t been right about this one. Last month I spent some time expressing doubts about Merck’s new obesity drug candidate taranabant, a cannabinoid-1 ligand similar to Sanofi-Aventis’s failed Acomplia (rimonabant). S-A ran into a number of... 73152@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2008-03-12T08:11:42-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/03/10/hits_misses_and_some_more_misses.php There’s an article in the latest Nature Reviews Drug Discovery on recent drug attrition rates that caught my eye. The authors are looking over 2006-2007 trials and approvals, comparing the biotech industry with traditional pharma. ("Biotech" is defined as a... 73149@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2008-03-10T07:28:30-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/27/antidepressants_depressing_news_or_not.php There’s an interesting analysis in the latest PLoS Medicine on the clinical effectiveness of four modern antidepressant drugs: Prozac (fluoxetine), Effexor (venlafaxine), the partially discontinued Serzone (nefazodone), and Paxil (paroxetine). The authors compared all the published placebo-controlled studies on these... 73128@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Central Nervous System 2008-02-27T08:27:15-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/08/a_look_under_the_hood.php There’s an excellent article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that summarizes the state of the HDL-raising drug world. It will also serve as an illustration, which can be repeated across therapeutic areas, of What We Don’t Know, and How Much... 73100@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-02-08T08:47:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/01/14/vytorin_holed_under_the_waterline.php Merck and Schering-Plough have released the data on a study of genetically high-LDL patients taking a statin alone (Zocor, simvastatin) or the combination of the statin and Schering-Plough's cholesterol absorption inhibitor (Vytorin, simvastatin and ezetimibe). Vytorin has a good share... 73023@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-01-14T16:06:33-05:00