/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-08-20T07:29:47-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/08/20/replacing_whats_being_lost.php Well, today’s subject isn’t a cheerful data set, but it certainly deserves some thought. Over at Pharmalot, Ed Silverman has some data from consulting firm AVOS Life Sciences, who have sat down to estimate how well various drug companies will... 73503@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-08-20T07:29:47-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/24/confident.php I’m going to expand on one of the points brought up yesterday, about the reported drug industry executive who was confident that his company’s Alzheimer’s therapy was ready to go out and make billions of dollars. It was that word... 73463@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-07-24T07:16:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/11/sharing_the_enlightenment.php Here's an interesting idea: Merck, Lilly, and Pfizer are bankrolling a startup company to look for new technologies for drug development. Enlight Biosciences will focus on the biggest bottlenecks and risk points in the process, including new imaging techniques for... 73433@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2008-07-11T07:37:23-05:00 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/2008/05/21/lurching_around_for_fun_and_profit.php I’ve been in this business for almost 19 years now. That means that the drugs that were discovered during my first few years of work are now either on the market or expected to be there soon. Fine, I spent... 73323@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2008-05-21T07:13:24-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/13/in_which_i_hate_a_wonder_drug.php Schering-Plough has had its share of troubles over the years, but the company has also seen itself saved by some pretty unlikely compounds. Vytorin (ezetimibe) is the example I’ve spoken about here, and if the drug doesn’t seem like a... 73293@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-05-13T07:32:55-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/02/not_useful_means_not_approvable_right.php One recent drug industry setback I haven't noted around here - well, OK, to be more specific, it's a Merck setback, and boy must they be getting sick of those - is the FDA's "not approvable" letter for the Singulair/Claritin... 73272@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-05-02T07:52:13-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/29/cordaptive_q_and_a.php So why is Merck's stock dropping - again? The FDA just unexpectedly handed them a "not approvable" letter for their latest drug, Cordaptive. Actually, we should stop calling it that, since they also told the company that they're not going... 73261@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2008-04-29T07:18:27-05:00 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/2008/04/07/preemption_for_real.php There's talk again about an idea that's been kicking around for some years: are drug companies shielded from liability after the FDA has approved their drugs for sale? Obviously, the current answer is "Not at all": consider the lawsuits over... 73214@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-04-07T07:30:39-05:00 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/2008/04/03/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/2008/03/28/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/2008/03/25/getting_to_lyrica.php There’s an interesting article in Angewandte Chemie by Richard Silverman of Northwestern, on the discovery of Lyrica (pregabalin). It’s a rare example of a compound that came right out of academia to become a drug, but the rest of its... 73181@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-03-25T07:19:17-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/03/24/thats_never_gonna_work.php A colleague and I were talking the other day about the (long) list of drugs that have been left for dead at some point during their development. There are some famous cases – Lipitor, for example, which wasn’t thought by... 73179@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2008-03-24T08:14:21-05:00