Mouse Models of Inflammation: Wrong Or Not?
I wrote here about a study that suggested that mice are a poor model for human inflammation. That paper created quite a splash - many research groups had experienced problems in this area, and this work seemed to offer a compelling reason for why that should happen.
Well, let the arguing commence, because now there's another paper out (also in PNAS) that analyzes the same data set and comes to the opposite conclusion. The authors of this new paper are specifically looking at the genes whose expression changed the most in both mice and humans, and they report a very high correlation. (The previous paper looked at the mouse...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 8, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Animal Testing Source Type: blogs
The Synthesis Machine
So I go away for a few days, and people are already planning to replace me (and my colleagues) with robots? Can't turn your back on anyone in this business. What that article is talking about is the long-term dream of a "synthesis machine", a device that would take whatever structure you fed into it and start in trying to make it. No such device exists - nothing even remotely close to it exists - but there's nothing impossible about it.
A British project called Dial-a-Molecule is laying the groundwork. Led by Whitby, the £700,000 (US$1.2-million) project began in 2010 and currently runs until May 2015. So far, it has mos...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 7, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
Summer Blogging Continues
Irregular summer blogging will continue until later this week - I'm on the road at the moment, and internet access is spotty. I'll be able to see my e-mail at some point, and occasionally clear out the spam that silts up the comments section, but otherwise I'll be hard to communicate with. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - August 4, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Animal Testing in the UK.
A reader sends along news that a minister at the UK's Home Office has made it his goal to completely eliminate animal testing in the country. Norman Baker has been a longtime activist on the issue of animal rights, and is now in a position to do something about it.
Or is he? Reading the article, it seems to me to be one of these "Form a commission to study the proposals for the plan" things. The current proposal is to increase the publicly available details about what animals are being used for:
In a statement, Mr Baker said: "The coalition government is committed to enhancing openness and transparency about the use of a...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 4, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Animal Testing Source Type: blogs
Amgen Cuts Hard
Amgen cuts over 2,500 jobs. Amgen completely shuts down its big facilities in Washington state and Colorado. Amgen's stock goes up nearly 7% in one day, adding about five (corrected late-night mistake) billion dollars in market cap. And there you have it. That's the industry.
As this FierceBiotech piece says, Amgen's big shareholders have been unhappy with the way the company has been performing during the recent biotech bull market. This also puts the company in line with all the other big outfits who have been trimming staff and consolidating research sites in the past few years. It also puts them in line with all the c...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 31, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Abandoned Pharma
It's not the most cheerful topic in the world, but NPR recently had an item on the decommissioned pharma research sites of New Jersey (of which there are many). Some of these are quite large, and correspondingly hard to unload onto anyone else. (This is, of course, a problem that is not unique to New Jersey, with plenty of ex-pharma sites around the US and the UK in particular falling into this category).
I got to see this in an earlier and less severe form when I worked at Schering-Plough: the company's old Bloomfield site proved difficult to deal with in the early 1990s once everyone had moved out of it. No other compan...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 30, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Industry History Source Type: blogs
Targacept Comes Up Empty, Yet Again
Targacept's attempt to salvage something by testing TC-5214 for overactive bladder has failed. John Carroll at FierceBiotech counts eight straight failed clinical trials from this company: a record? I don't see anyone beating that very easily, that's for sure. Nicotinic receptors have proven to be a very, very difficult field to work in, and I'm not sure that Targacept has anything left in their tank. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - July 28, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Summer Blogging
I wanted to let everyone know that blogging will be irregular around here for the next week or so. I'll be taking some time off here and there, and while I'll surely get a few blog posts in, they won't show up at the usual times. (I started the whole time-off process over the weekend, with a trip to Stellafane, the big amateur astronomy gathering up in Vermont. Despite earlier weather forecasts, Saturday night was clear and dark, the best night skies I've seen in years. My wife and kids joined me (their first star party), and as we were getting pulled pork sandwiches from the food tent, my son looked around and said "Wow, ...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 28, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
The Antibiotic Gap: It's All of the Above
Here's a business-section column at the New York Times on the problem of antibiotic drug discovery. To those of us following the industry, the problems of antibiotic drug discovery are big pieces of furniture that we've lived with all our lives; we hardly even notice if we bump into them again. You'd think that readers of the Times or other such outlets would have come across the topic a few times before, too, but there must always be a group for which it's new, no matter how many books and newspaper articles and magazine covers and TV segments are done on it. It's certainly important enough - there's no doubt that we real...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 25, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Infectious Diseases Source Type: blogs
Phenotypic Assays in Cancer Drug Discovery
The topic of phenotypic screening has come up around here many times, as indeed it comes up very often in drug discovery. Give your compounds to cells or to animals and look for the effect you want: what could be simpler? Well, a lot of things could, as anyone who's actually done this sort of screening will be glad to tell you, but done right, it's a very powerful technique.
It's also true that a huge amount of industrial effort is going into cancer drug discovery, so you'd think that there would be a natural overlap between these: see if your compounds kill or slow cancer cells, or tumors in an animal, and you're on trac...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 24, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
Neratinib Comes Through For Puma
Yet another entry in the "Why do people keep investing in biopharma?" files. Take a look at the case of Puma Biotechnology. Their stock was as high as $140/share earlier in the year, and it gradually deflated to the high 50s/low 60s as time went on. But yesterday, after hours, they reported unexpectedly good Phase III results for neratinib in breast cancer, and as I write, they're at $228 or so, up about $167 per share.
It's another HER2/EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (like Tykerb/lapatinib in the small molecule space, although neratinib is an irreversible inhibitor) and would be targeted at patients who are now taking H...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 23, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
How Many Biopharma Employees Would Rather Be Working Somewhere Else?
How many people working in the biopharma industry would jump to another company if they could? According to this survey, it's just over half: well above the average set by other industry sectors.
The usual reasons are cited, in part (pay, opportunity for advancement). But two factors that seemed unusually prominent in our industry were high stress levels and "difficult relations with supervisors and co-workers". I found that last one interesting, because (like all science and engineering fields) we do have a certain number of people in this business who can be described, as the old British music hall song has it, as "E's ...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 23, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
The Broad Gets $650 Million For Psychiatric Research
The Broad Institute seems to have gone through a bit of rough funding patch some months ago, but things are looking up: they've received a gift of $650 million to do basic research in psychiatric disorders. Believe it, that'll keep everyone busy, for sure.
I enjoyed Eric Lander's characterization of much of the 1990s work on the genetic basis of mental illness as "pretty much completely useless", and I don't disagree one bit. His challenge, as he and the rest of the folks at the Broad well know, is to keep someone from being able to say that about them in the year 2034. CNS work is the ultimate black box, which makes a pe...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 22, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs
Put Them in Cells and Find Out
So, when you put some diverse small molecules into cellular assays, how many proteins are they really hitting? You may know a primary target or two that they're likely to interact with, or (if you're doing phenotypic screening), you may not have any idea at all. But how many proteins (or other targets) are there that bind small molecules at all?
This is a question that many people are interested in, but hard data to answer it are not easily obtained. There have been theoretical estimates via several techniques, but (understandably) not too much experimental evidence. Now comes this paper from Ben Cravatt's group, and it's...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 22, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical Biology Source Type: blogs
The Hep C Field Gets Nastier By the Minute
What a mess there is in the hepatitis C world. Gilead is, famously, dominating the market with Sovaldi, whose price has set off all sorts of cost/benefit debates. The companies competing with them are scrambling to claim positions, and the Wall Street Journal says that AbbVie is really pulling out all the stops. Try this strategy on for size:
In a lawsuit filed in February, AbbVie noted it patented the idea of combining two of Gilead's drugs—Sovaldi and an experimental drug called ledipasvir, which Gilead plans to combine into one treatment—and is therefore entitled to monetary damages if Gilead brings the combination...
Source: In the Pipeline - July 21, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
