Decision Time at Merck
Actually, decision time was a little while back. But I've heard from more than one source that this week is when everyone in Merck's chemistry hears the details of the job cuts and rearrangements announced recently. Good luck to all concerned. . . (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 28, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Molecular Dynamics, Pro and Con
Readers will remember the spirited discussion about the usefulness of molecular dynamics in the comments thread to this post. Now Anthony Nicholls of OpenEye Software, who ignited that particular powder train, is going to defend his position in person this Wednesday. There will be a lunchtime seminar and discussion at the OpenEye offices (222 3rd Street, Suite 3210 in Cambridge). If you're in the area and going, you'll need to contact them to make sure that there's room. There will surely be a report from Ash at Curious Wavefunction if you can't make it, though. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 28, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: In Silico Source Type: blogs
Back to Hendrix
It was a very strange experience to speak to a crowd of students in the same room where I had my first college chemistry course. I could see the row of seats where I used to sit 34 years ago, and I was glad that I was speaking later in the morning than that old class used to start (7:40 AM, and no, my notes were not always coherent). I wasn't able to relive the experience of walking into the old labs, though, because they've been extensively renovated and are far nicer (and more functional) than they were back then. The building itself has been expanded, like many other parts of the campus - from some angles, the place loo...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 28, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Dietary Fat and Heart Disease
Here's a provocative article at the British Medical Journal on cardiovascular outcomes and diet. Now, I free admit that the BMJ has a tendency towards controversialism, but I'm hardly in a position to throw stones. The author, Aseem Malhotra, says "Saturated fat is not the issue".
Human lipidology is a very complex field, and anyone who tells you that they have the definite answers needs to be treated with caution. As has been well documented, the consensus advice about dietary fats of all kinds has varied quite a bit, and I don't think it's anywhere near settling down. The role of pharmaceutical intervention isn't settl...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 24, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cardiovascular Disease Source Type: blogs
Travel (Back to Arkansas)
I'm writing this entry from my old school, Hendrix College, who are having me back for an awards ceremony. I'll be speaking to some of the classes while I'm here, and trying to find my way around after 30 years of building and renovation. But it's nice to see where I first learned chemistry, I have to say. . . (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 24, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Allosteric Binding Illuminated?
G-protein coupled receptors are one of those areas that I used to think I understood, until I understood them better. These things are very far from being on/off light switches mounted in drywall - they have a lot of different signaling mechanisms, and none of them are simple, either.
One of those that's been known for a long time, but remains quite murky, is allosteric modulation. There are many compounds known that clearly are not binding at the actual ligand site in some types of GPCR, but (equally clearly) can affect their signaling by binding to them somewhere else. So receptors have allosteric sites - but what do th...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: In Silico Source Type: blogs
ACSNano on Problematic Papers
The editorial board at ACSNano has come out with a statement on how they'd like problematic papers to be handled. This, the article most pointedly does not say, is surely a response to the controversy over a recent (ridiculously Photoshopped) paper that appeared in the journal. That one didn't make anyone look good, and I can see why the editors felt that they had to make an effort.
The piece is superficially reasonable. They're asking that if someone sees a paper with questionable content, that they should contact the journal first, which I think is good practice in any case. But then we have this:
In the end, a decisio...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 22, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Ariad in Limbo
As feared, the recent trouble at Ariad has indeed put their plans to move into a new site on hold. The Boston Globe has the story here. I go past this construction site all the time - well, to be accurate, if you travel around Cambridge, you past a lot of construction sites, all the time. One would assume that if Ariad has to back out that someone else will find a use for the space. . . (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 22, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Size Doesn't Matter. Does Anything?
There's a new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that tries to find out what factors about a company influence its research productivity. This is a worthy goal, but one that's absolutely mined with problems in gathering and interpreting the data. The biggest one is the high failure rate that afflicts everyone in the clinic: you could have a company that generates a lot of solid ideas, turns out good molecules, gets them into humans with alacrity, and still ends up looking like a failure because of mechanistic problems or unexpected toxicity. You can shorten those odds, for sure (or lengthen them!), but you can never re...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 22, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Getting van der Waals Forces Right
I'm actually going to ignore the headline on this article at Chemistry World, although coming up with it must have made someone's day. Once I'd gotten my head back up out of my hands and read the rest of the piece, it was quite interesting.
It's a summary of this paper in Nature Chemistry, which used the ingenious system shown to measure what the alkyl-chain interactions are worth in different solvents.
The team has now used a synthetic molecular balance to measure the strength of van der Waals interactions between apolar alkyl chains in more than 30 distinct organic, fluorous and aqueous solvent environments. The balanc...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 21, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
Catalyst Pharmaceuticals And Their Business Plan
The orphan-drug model is a popular one in the biopharma business these days. But like every other style of business, it has something-for-nothing artists waiting around it. Take a look at this article by Adam Feuerstein on Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, and see what category you think they belong in.
They're developing a compound called Firdapse for Lambert-Eaton Myasthenic Syndrome (LEMS), a rare neuromuscular disorder. It's caused by an autoimmune response to one set of voltage-gated calcium channels in the peripheral nervous system. Right now, the treatments for the condition that seem to provide much benefit are intravenou...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 21, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Regulatory Affairs Source Type: blogs
Diazomethane Without Tears. Or Explosions.
Here's a neat paper from Oliver Kappe's group on diazomethane flow chemistry. They're using the gas-permeable tube-in-tube technique (as pioneered by Steve Ley's group). Flow systems have been described for using diazomethane before, but this looks like a convenient lab-scale method.
Diazomethane is the perfect reagent to apply flow chemistry to. It's small, versatile, reactive, does a lot of very interesting and useful chemistry (generally quickly and in high yields). . .and it's also volatile, extremely toxic, and a really significant explosion hazard. Generating it as you use it (and reacting it quickly) is a very appe...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 18, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
Ariad (And Its Drug) In Trouble
Ariad's Inclusig (ponatimib) is in even more trouble than it looked like, and that was already a lot. The company announced earlier this morning that its Phase III trial comparing the drug to Gleevec (imatinib) is not just on hold - it's been stopped, and patients are being taken off the drug. That can't be good news for the drug's current approved status, either:
Iclusig is commercially available in the U.S. and EU for patients with resistant or intolerant CML and Philadelphia-chromosome positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia. ARIAD continues to work with health authorities to make appropriate changes to the Iclusig produ...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 18, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
Cognitive Dissonance at Lilly
If there is some chemistry hiring going on out there in the big pharma world, and more to come, Eli Lilly does not look like it's going to be joining that kind of party. The analysts following its stock are getting increasingly worked up:
As the analyst notes, there are two distinct schools of thought about Lilly's pipeline. One, represented by Tim Anderson at Bernstein, is that Lilly's broad pipeline of late-stage assets will rescue the company from the loss of patents on the company's top drugs. The bear view, though, is that more failures of high-profile programs--like the recent Phase III failure of ramucirumab for br...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Creativity Training For Creative Creators
Here's a bilous broadside against the whole "creativity" business - the books, courses, and workshops that will tell you how to unleash the creative powers within your innards and those of your company:
And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. There were TED talks on how to be a creative person. There were “Innovation Jams” at which IBM employees brainstormed collectively over a global hookup, and “Thinking Out of the Box” desktop sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club. There were creativity consultants you could hire, and c...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Who Discovers and Why Source Type: blogs
