/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-04-16T07:19:54-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 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/2008/04/04/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/2008/03/05/smaller_wetter_harder_to_work_with.php There’s an interesting article coming out in J. Med. Chem. on antibiotic compounds, which highlights something that’s pretty clear if you spend some time looking at the drugs in that area. We make a big deal (or have made one... 73140@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2008-03-05T08:14:24-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/31/resistant_little_creatures.php The post here the other day on resistant bacterial infections prompted some readers to wonder why the drug industry isn’t doing more to come up with compounds in this field. It’s not like there’s no money to be made, and... 72827@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2007-10-31T20:22:24-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/29/bacterial_infection_better_or_worse_than_cancer.php There’s been a steady stream of reports in the news about methacillin-resistant Staph. aureus. It’s not a new problem, but (like other nasty infections) it does get a lot of press when the media start paying attention. Works in reverse,... 72810@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2007-10-29T07:33:13-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/07/09/now_with_ethyl_mesylate.php One of the stories I missed while on hiatus has been Roche's recall of antiretroviral Viracept (nelfinavir) tablets. As readers may know, a problem with many batches of the drug became known in June. It's a mesylate (aka methanesulfonate) salt,... 72478@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2007-07-09T19:49:43-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/05/22/evolution_in_action.php As the cost of sequencing goes down, a lot of once-crazy experiments become feasible. There's a good case in point this week in the preprint section of PNAS. A team of researchers looked at a single patient undergoing treatment with... 72327@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2007-05-22T06:54:28-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/05/07/brazil_raises_the_pirate_flag.php Back in 2005, the government of Brazil threatened to break the patent on Abbott's HIV medication Kaletra if the price didn't come down (see here and here). But after a lot of arm-wrestling, a deal was reached. Now it's Merck's... 72284@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Prices 2007-05-07T09:18:31-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/04/25/a_new_hiv_therapy_yawn.php Pfizer got a tiny bit of good news yesterday when an FDA panel recommended their new HIV drug, Maraviroc, for approval. There are several stories that can be told about this news, so let's try a few: The business story... 72252@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2007-04-25T06:45:17-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/04/13/deep_breaths.php I've been out of the research labs for over two months now, and you know what I miss the most? No, not the safety meetings (hah!) or the smell of the solvents - what I miss is getting fresh data... 72211@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Clinical Trials 2007-04-13T10:02:19-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/02/07/vertex_hepatitis_and_gripping_the_arms_of_your_chair.php Antiviral drugs are one of those big unmet medical needs that we talk about in the drug industry. The reason we talk about them is, of course, that from a business standpoint - and this is a business, for sure... 71981@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2007-02-07T08:43:56-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/10/18/peptides_as_texts.php There's a curious paper (subscriber-only link) in the latest Nature that's getting some attention, titled "A linguistic model for the rational design of antimicrobial peptides". For non-subscribers, here's a synopsis of the work from the magazine's news site. A group... 67590@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Biological News 2006-10-18T13:13:48-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/09/11/enzymes_do_whatever_they_want_to.php It's been a while since I wrote about the neuraminidase inhibitors (Tamiflu and Relenza, oseltamavir and zanamivir). As we start to head into fall, though, I'm sure that avian flu will invade the headlines again, if nothing else (and I... 65315@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ In Silico 2006-09-11T19:29:47-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/07/19/fuzeons_fallout.php I wrote some time ago (Ay! Four years ago - have I been doing this for that long?) about the Roche/Trimeris HIV drug Fuzeon (T-20, enfuvirtide), and its costly manufacturing process. Roche built a factory in Colorado just to make... 62080@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Infectious Diseases 2006-07-19T21:50:00-05:00