/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derekb.lowe@gmail.com 2012-02-10T13:03:49-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/10/the_terrifying_cost_of_a_new_drug.php Matthew Herper at Forbes has a very interesting column, building on some data from Bernard Munos (whose work on drug development will be familiar to readers of this blog). What he and his colleague Scott DeCarlo have done is conceptually... 75449@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Prices 2012-02-10T13:03:49-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/26/putting_a_number_on_chemical_beauty.php There's a new paper out in Nature Chemistry called "Quantifying the Chemical Beauty of Drugs". The authors are proposing a new "desirability score" for chemical structures in drug discovery, one that's an amalgam of physical and structural scores. To their... 75405@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2012-01-26T07:31:12-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/28/nowhere_to_go_but_up.php I wanted to let people know that I've got a "Perspective" piece in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, entitled "Nowhere to Go But Up?". The journal is starting to run these opinion/overview articles, and contacted me for one - I hope... 75349@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Scientific Literature 2011-12-28T12:27:14-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/13/the_sirtuin_saga.php Science has a long article detailing the problems that have developed over the last few years in the whole siturin story. That's a process that I've been following here as well (scrolling through this category archive will give you the... 75325@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Aging and Lifespan 2011-12-13T09:19:40-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/09/pharma_overview.php Here's a report from Science Careers on "A Pharma Industry in Crisis". Readers here will find much of what's said to be familiar - partly because they interviewed people like me and Chemjobber for the piece (!) But it's worth... 75322@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2011-12-09T15:28:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/09/drugs_airplanes_and_radios.php Wavefunction has a good post in response to this article, which speculates "If we designed airplanes the way we design drugs. . ." I think the original article is worth reading, but some - perhaps many - of its points... 75321@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2011-12-09T11:24:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/08/the_loss_of_the_middle_drugs_and_the_people_who_find_them.php This report on a speech by Roche's CEO, Severin Schwan, will surprise no one. He's forecasting that the pharma world is heading for a bimodal distribution. On one end, you'll have the companies that have managed to find things new... 75317@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2011-12-08T09:46:31-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/05/naming_your_company_after_yourself.php This morning's post got me to thinking - are there any examples of modern biopharma companies that have taken the name of their founder and come out well? Back in Ye Olde Days, that was the default setting, of course,... 75311@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2011-12-05T12:05:05-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/30/lipitor_expiration_day.php As one of Garrison Keillor's characters says (in WLT), "I always knew the end would come. And here it is, the end". Lipitor (atorvastatin) goes off patent today, and I can recommend this overview by Matthew Herper at Forbes. Will... 75299@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cardiovascular Disease 2011-11-30T13:29:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/28/so_what_did_lipitor_do_for_pfizer_or_its_shareholders.php That's what this columnist at the Harvard Business Review would like to know. To the question "Was it worth it?", he answers "Probably not", and lists some things that other companies might learn from Pfizer's experience. I doubt that anyone... 75293@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2011-11-28T08:42:39-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/22/regeneron_finally_makes_it_to_the_market.php I've been doing drug research since 1989 myself, which means that I'm fairly experienced. But Regeneron started in this business a year or two before I did, and they're just now getting their first major drug, Eylea (aflibercept) onto the... 75288@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Central Nervous System 2011-11-22T08:00:54-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/21/of_drug_research_and_moneyball.php This piece on Michael Lewis and Billy Beane is nice to read, even if you haven't read Moneyball. (And if you haven't, consider doing so - it's not perfect, but it's well worth the time). Several thoughts occurred to me... 75284@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2011-11-21T08:35:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/18/two_from_glaxos_old_days.php Two of the scientists behind Glaxo's rise have passed away recently, within a couple of weeks of each other. There's John Bradshaw, who joined Allen and Hanburys in 1971. He was the chemist who discovered Zantac (ranitidine) in 1976. Later,... 75281@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2011-11-18T08:52:15-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/16/ray_firestones_take_on_pharmas_plight.php And while I'm linking out to other opinion pieces, Ray Firestone has a cri du couer in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, looking back over his decades in the business. Regular readers of this blog (or of Ray Firestone!) will recognize... 75278@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2011-11-16T12:36:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/16/virtual_pharma_revisited.php John LaMattina takes on the perennial question of "Should a big drug company ditch R&D and just inlicense everything?". That one comes up regularly, and I've never been able to quite see how it works. (You'd also figure that since... 75277@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2011-11-16T12:28:06-05:00