/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2009-11-05T08:35:21-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/11/05/what_exactly_does_resveratrol_do.php Resveratrol's a mighty interesting compound. It seems to extend lifespan in yeast and various lower organisms, and has a wide range of effects in mice. Famously, GlaxoSmithKline has expensively bought out Sirtris, a company whose entire research program started with... 74125@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Aging and Lifespan 2009-11-05T08:35:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/10/to_what_end.php I was looking through my RSS feed of journal articles this morning, and came across this new one in J. Med. Chem.. Now, there's nothing particularly unusual about this work. The authors are exploring a particular subtype of serotonin receptor... 74056@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Academia (vs. Industry) 2009-09-10T07:21:51-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/08/11/dealing_with_hedgehog_screening_results.php I was looking over a paper in PNAS, where a group at Stanford describes finding several small molecules that inhibit Hedgehog signaling. That's a very interesting (and ferociously complex) area, and the more tools that are available to study it,... 74009@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2009-08-11T10:35:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/07/17/drug_approvals_natural_and_unnatural.php I seem to have been putting a lot of graphics up this week, so here's another one. This is borrowed from a recent Science paper on the future of natural-products based drug discovery. It's interesting both from that viewpoint, and... 73982@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2009-07-17T08:04:13-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/07/15/why_does_screening_work_at_all_free_business_proposal_included.php I've been meaning to get around to a very interesting paper from the Shoichet group that came out a month or so ago in Nature Chemical Biology. Today's the day! It examines the content of screening libraries and compares them... 73978@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ In Silico 2009-07-15T08:26:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/06/29/eli_lilly_gives_it_away.php Not long ago, I wrote about a Pfizer program for smaller companies to come screen their targets against Pfizer's compound bank. Now Eli Lilly has flipped that around. In an initiative to bring other people's compounds out of the stockrooms... 73953@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2009-06-29T07:33:26-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/06/19/more_hot_air_from_me_on_screening.php After yesterday's post on pathway patents, I figured that I should talk about high-throughput screening in academia. I realize that there are some serious endeavors going on, some of them staffed by ex-industry people. So I don't mean to come... 73941@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2009-06-19T07:43:33-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/05/19/want_to_screen_pfizers_compounds_sign_here.php I've heard that Pfizer is doing something unusual with its proprietary compound collection: they're offering to let other people screen it. Now, that's quite a step. Most companies guard their compounds pretty closely, considering them to be key assets. But... 73880@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2009-05-19T10:43:26-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/04/29/no_magic_involved.php What a mess! Science has a retraction of a 2005 paper, which is always a nasty enough business, but in this case, the authors can’t agree on whether it should be retracted or not. And no one seems to be... 73848@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Dark Side 2009-04-29T07:37:07-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/03/13/drugs_for_bacteria_really_that_hard_or_not.php A few readers have told me that I’m being too hard on antibacterial drug discovery, at least on target-based efforts in the field. The other day I asked if anyone could name a single antibacterial drug on the market that... 73782@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2009-03-13T07:33:06-05:00 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/2009/02/24/structureactivity_lather_rinse_and_repeat.php Medicinal chemists spend a lot of their time exploring and trying to make sense of structure-activity relationships (SARs). We vary our molecules in all kinds of ways, have the biologists run them through the assays, and then sit down to... 73754@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2009-02-24T08:45:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/01/21/the_hideous_numbers_of_compounds.php I was blithely throwing around the term “chemical space” in yesterday’s post. So, what am I talking about, and how much room is in there, anyway? Let's narrow it down to organic compounds, to start with, or at least compounds... 73694@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Assays 2009-01-21T08:25:10-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/01/20/diversityoriented_synthesis_oriented_the_right_way.php Ever hear of Diversity-Oriented Synthesis? It’s an odd bird. DOS tries to maximize the number of structures and scaffolds produced from a given synthetic scheme – to find the most efficient ways to populate the largest amount of chemical space.... 73693@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Chemical News 2009-01-20T08:31:53-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/11/14/sticking_it_to_proteins.php So, you’re making an enzyme inhibitor drug, some compound that’s going to go into the protein’s active site and gum up the works. You usually want these things to be potent, so you can be sure that you’ve knocked down... 73615@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Toxicology 2008-11-14T08:28:30-05:00