An Unknown Author With Someone Else's Work. Why?
Here's a bizarre one: someone apparently faked up a bunch of author names and contact information, and published results (in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications) that they're heard Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard talk about. The motive? Well. . .the only thing that makes sense is sheer vituperativeness, and even that doesn't make much. Here's the story - see if you can make sense of it! (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - September 26, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Nobel Speculation Time
As we approach October, Nobel Speculation Season is upon us again. And Ash is right at Curious Wavefunction - making the predictions gets easier every year, because you get to keep the lists you had from before, with maybe a name or two removed because they actually won. Paul at Chembark usually does a long post on the subject this time of year, but he seems to have his hands full (understandably!) getting his academic lab set up and teaching his courses the first time through.
The Thomson Reuters people have made their annual predictions, based on citation counts and such measures, and so far every other article I've see...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 26, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: General Scientific News Source Type: blogs
MacArthur Awards in Chemistry
Congratulations to Phil Baran of Scripps for getting a MacArthur Foundation grant. There aren't many of those that have landed in the field of chemistry - a commenter here points out Carolyn Bertozzi at Berkeley, Laura Kiessling at Wisconsin, and Melanie Sanford at Michigan as the past winners. A worthy bunch! (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - September 25, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: General Scientific News Source Type: blogs
Sugammadex's Problems: Is the Merck/Schering-Plough Deal the Worst?
That didn't take long. Just a few days after Roger Perlmutter at Merck had praised the team that developed Bridon (sugammadex), the FDA turned it down for the second time. The FDA seems to be worried about hypersensitivity reactions to the drug - that was the grounds on which they rejected it in 2008. Merck ran another study to address this, but the agency apparently is now concerned about how that trial was run. What we know, according to FiercePharma, is that they "needed to assess an inspection of a clinical trial site conducting the hypersensitivity study". Frustratingly for Merck, their application was approved in the...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 25, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
When Does a Biotech Press Release Constitute Fraud?
What can you say in a press release about a clinical trial? "Darn near anything, apparently" will be the response from many people who've been seeing them over the years. But really, what can you say, legally? Is there some point where you've clearly crossed the line into fraud, or are all these things just varying interpretations of scientific data?
That uncomfortable question has been working its way through the court system in the person of W. Scott Harkonen, former CEO of Intermune. This case is back in the news thanks to a long article in the Washington Post (pointed out to me by a reader of this blog in the comments...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 24, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
What's An Important Paper? Take the JACS Challenge!
Here's a darn good question: how good are we at telling (when they're published) what scientific papers are important? We were talking around here the other day about famous work that had been rejected, and this is the less dramatic aspect of the same phenomenon.
At ScienceGeist, they're putting this to an empirical test. Given a ten-year-old issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could a person predict which papers in it have had the most impact? Well, here's the issue, and here's the survey to take after you've looked it over. Please don't cheat by looking up citation counts or the like - approach this o...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Google Versus Aging
If you haven't heard that Google is now funding research into human aging and lifespan, they'll be very disappointed. There's been plenty of publicity, which I find sort of interesting, considering that there's not too much to announce:
The Time article—and a Google blog post released at the same time—provided scant detail about what the new company, called Calico, will actually do. According to Time, the company, to be based somewhere in the Bay Area, will place long-term bets on unspecified technologies that could help fight the diseases of aging.
Page did tell Time he thinks biomedical researchers may have focused...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 20, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Aging and Lifespan Source Type: blogs
Prosensa: One Duchenne Therapy Down
In the post here the other day about Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) I mentioned two other companies that are looking at transcriptional approaches: Prosensa (with GSK) and Sarepta. They've got antisense-driven exon-skipping mechanisms, rather than PTC's direct read-through one.
Well, Sarepta still does, anyway. Prosensa and GSK just announced clinical data on their agent, drisapersen, and it appears to have missed completely. The primary endpoint was a pretty direct one, total distance walked over six minutes, and they didn't make statistical significance versus placebo. This was over 48 weeks of treatment, and none of...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 20, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Element Shortages, Really Light and Really Heavy
Element shortages are in the news these days. The US has been talking about shutting down its strategic helium reserve, and there are plenty of helium customers worried about the prospect. The price of liquid helium, not a commodity that you usually hear quoted on the afternoon financial report, has apparently more than tripled in the last year.
I think that this is more of a gap problem than a running-out-of-helium one, though. There's still a lot of helium in the world, and the natural gas boom of recent years has made even more of it potentially available. Trapping it, though, is not cheap - this is something that has ...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 19, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
File Under "Nerve, Lots Of"
From an editorial in Science written by the president and the vice-president of the European Research Council:
Imagine sitting over a pile of applications submitted to one of the most prestigious funding agencies. Suddenly, what you read appears familiar—not only the idea, but its terminology and the methods proposed. You recognize entire sentences because you wrote them. This scenario must have been an utter surprise for one of the European Research Council’s (ERC’s) evaluation panel members who, last year, stumbled across the most bizarre case of scientific misconduct that the organization has witnessed so far.
Y...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 19, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Dark Side Source Type: blogs
The Arguing Over PTC124 and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
This article at Nature Biotechnology does an excellent job explaining the details.
Premature "stop" codons in the DNA of DMD patients, particularly in the dystrophin gene, are widely thought to be one of the underlying problems in the disease. (The same mechanism is believed to operate in many other genetic-mutation-driven conditions as well. Ataluren is supposed to promote "read-through" of these to allow the needed protein to be produced anyway. That's not a crazy idea at all - there's been a lot of thought about ways to do that, and several aminoglycoside antibiotics have been shown to work through that mechanism. Of t...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 18, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Thoughts on the Scientific Publishing Model, And Its Inverse
I mentioned the idea of an Elsevier boycott here last year. Here's someone who's thought about another course of action: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em - up to a point:
How about this for a solution:
1. We start a (say) monthly journal.
2. Set up a simple, lucrative payment for accepted articles. As a first stab, how about $10,000 paid personally to the researchers responsible. Similarly, each reviewer receives $2,000 for each article reviewed.
I imagine this would be enough to attract some serious submissions. So serious, in fact, that universities and libraries would be obliged to subscribe (at drastically reduced p...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Surveying BioPharma Job Ads
This is an interesting article in Nature Biotechnology that I'm trying to figure out whether I believe. It's a combination of interviews with managers across biopharma along with an analysis of open-position job ads from thousands of sources. What the authors are trying to do is figure out what sorts of skills employers in this field are looking for, and whether that's changed.
First, let's go to what they found, then we can start the arguing. The quantitative data from all those job postings is presumably pretty solid. The degree-required distribution shows that (weirdly) 14% of the posted openings require only high-scho...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Crystallography Without Crystallizing: An Update
I wrote here about a very promising X-ray crystallography technique which produces structures of molecules that don't even have to be crystalline. Soaking a test substance into a metal-organic-framework (MOF) lattice gave enough repeating order that x-ray diffraction was possible.
The most startling part of the paper, other than the concept itself, was the determination of the structure of the natural product miyakosyne A. That one's not crystalline, and will never be crystalline, but the authors not only got the structure, but were able to assign its absolute stereochemistry. (The crystalline lattice is full of heavy ato...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 16, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Analytical Chemistry Source Type: blogs
Value For the Money
BioCentury always does a big issue for the fall, entitled "Back to School". They often use this as a state-of-biopharma platform, going into depth on what they see as the biggest issues that need to be addressed. This year, the September 2 issue, they're telling people (and not for the first time!) to get braced for higher standards for what health insurance is going to pay for:
Drug companies must start creating the case for value differentiation in discovery and then steadily build a body of evidence throughout the product development process.
Some drug developers have figured this out and have reshaped both their pipe...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 13, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Prices Source Type: blogs
