/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-10-02T10:54:34-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/10/02/taranabant_is_no_more.php Merck has taken a step that many people have been expecting, and announced that they are no longer developing taranabant, their cannabinoid antagonist (or is it an inverse agonist?) I'd expressed grave doubts about the drug earlier this year, which... 73563@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-10-02T10:54:34-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/15/metabolic_hope_springs_eternal.php Now, if I were still doing metabolic disease work, I'd be all over this target: CAMKK2, which is mercifully short for "Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase kinase 2". (Kinase nomenclature has been out of hand for years, in case you're wondering). CAMKK2... 73439@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2008-07-15T08:48:40-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/18/all_the_fat_cells_youll_ever_have_sort_of.php I’ve done a fair amount of work against drug targets for metabolic disorders, so a recent letter in Nature caught my eye. The authors have used an ingenious technique to determine the number and age of the adipocytes (fat cells)... 73378@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2008-06-18T07:11:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/16/alli_underwhelming.php About a year ago, I wrote about GSK's attempt to sell the lipase inhibitor orlistat over the counter as Alli: "So my forecast for Alli is strong sales - for a while. Then it takes a dive, never to scale... 73369@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2008-06-16T06:32:02-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/08/merck_bails_on_natural_products.php Every few years, you hear talk of a renaissance in natural products-based drug discovery. Well, this news should postpone the next round of optimism for a bit longer: Merck is cutting their natural products program entirely. They've had a long... 73286@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2008-05-08T07:50:51-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/25/why_buy_anyway.php I don’t want to say that this is a trend, but I notice that GSK is saying that they’re going to leave Sirtris more or less alone as well (as Takeda has said they’ll do with Millennium). The researchers in... 73254@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2008-04-25T07:47:23-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/10/exubera_safety_and_no_guarantees.php As mentioned yesterday, I would have to say that Mannkind is in big trouble. I’d never heard of the company until the Wonder Drug Factory was closing back in Connecticut, but Mannkind was moving some of their operations into the... 73219@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2008-04-10T07:20:09-05:00 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/2008/04/03/whose_guess_is_better.php I was having a discussion the other day about which therapeutic areas have the best predictive assays. That is, what diseases can you be reasonably sure of treating before your drug candidate gets into (costly) human trials? As we went... 73209@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Animal Testing 2008-04-03T07:19:01-05:00 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/2008/03/04/off_target_which_target_did_you_mean.php Here's a snapshot for you, to illustrate how little we know about what many of our compounds can do. I was browsing the latest issue of the British Journal of Pharmacology, which is one of many perfectly respectable journals in... 73135@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-03-04T08:14:55-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/25/more_on_merck_and_taranabant.php My piece on Merck last week seems to have touched a few nerves, if some of the comments and e-mails I’ve received are any sign. To clarify things: I agree that Merck is still doing some excellent science, as they... 73125@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Diabetes and Obesity 2008-02-25T08:21:20-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/20/what_you_become_known_for.php A recent item from InVivoBlog about Merck which brought up some interesting points. They aren’t cheerful ones. The article is largely about Merck’s reputation, which has taken some dents in recent years, to put it lightly. The Vioxx debacle is... 73120@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2008-02-20T08:14:48-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/01/18/eat_it_breath_it_soak_in_it.php After Pfizer’s Exubera inhaled-insulin product died so horribly in the market last year, the other companies working in the same space had to be worried. Lilly and Alkermes have had a long-running program, as has a smaller company called Mannkind.... 73036@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-01-18T08:13:21-05:00 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