How Much to Develop a Drug? An Update.
I've referenced this Matthew Herper piece on the cost of drug development several times over the last few years. It's the one where he totaled up pharma company R&D expenditures (from their own financial statements) and then just divided that by the number of drugs produced. Crude, but effective - and what it said was that some companies were spending ridiculous, unsustainable amounts of money for what they were getting back.
Now he's updated his analysis, looking at a much longer list of companies (98 of them!) over the past ten years. Here's the list, in a separate post. Abbott is at the top, but that's misleading, sinc...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Industry History Source Type: blogs
Cancer and Autism: Slow Down
The New York Times had a rather confusing story the other day about the PTEN gene, autism, and cancer. Unfortunately, it turned into a good example of how not to explain a subject like this, and it missed out (or waited too long) to explain a number of key concepts. Things like "one gene can be responsible a lot of different things in a human phenotype", and "genes can have a lot of different mutations, which can also do different things", and "autism's genetic signature is complex and not well worked out, not least because it's such a wide-ranging diagnosis", and (perhaps most importantly, "people with autism are not doom...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
An Interview With A GSK Shanghai Scientist
Here's an interview with Liu Xeubin, formerly of GlaxoSmithKline in China. That prospect should perk up the ears of anyone who's been following the company's various problems and scandals in that country.
Liu Xuebin recalls working 12-hour shifts and most weekends for months, under pressure to announce research results that would distinguish his GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) lab in China as a force in multiple sclerosis research.
It paid off -- for a while. Nature Medicine published findings about a potential new MS treatment approach in January 2010 and months later Liu was promoted to associate director of Glaxo’s global ...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 9, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Development Source Type: blogs
Make Up the Elemental Analysis: An Update
Chemistry Blog has more on the incident picked up first at ChemBark and noted here yesterday. This rapidly-becoming-famous case has the Supporting Information file of a paper published at Organometallics seemingly instructing a co-author to "make up" an elemental analysis to put in the manuscript.
Now the editor of the journal (John Gladysz of Texas A&M) has responded to Chemistry Blog as follows:
Wednesday 07 August
Dear Friends of Organometallics,
Chemical Abstracts alerted us to the statement you mention,which was overlooked during the peer review process, on Monday 05 August. At that time, the manuscript was pulled ...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 8, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
The 3D Fragment Consortium
Fragment-based screening comes up here fairly often (and if you're interested in the field, you should also have Practical Fragments on your reading list). One of the complaints both inside and outside the fragment world is that there are a lot of primary hits that fall into flat/aromatic chemical space (I know that those two don't overlap perfectly, but you know the sort of things I mean). The early fragment libraries were heavy in that sort of chemical matter, and the sort of collections you can buy still tend to be.
So people have talked about bringing in natural-product-like structures, and diversity-oriented-synthesi...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 8, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Assays Source Type: blogs
