Merry Christmas From the FDA
I see that the FDA is in the holiday spirit - they've told Ariad that they can bring Iclusig back to the market in the US, subject to restrictions, and Amarin, who have been trying, quite unsuccessfully, to get approval for wide use of a fish-oil-pill, have at least gotten a stay of execution for now. And in what is a real surprise, United Therapeutics got approval for an oral version of treprostinil, a synthetic prostaglandin analog, for PAH. Since they'd been turned down twice before on that one, I don't think anyone anticipated that one, since it hadn't looked too impressive in the clinic. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Regulatory Affairs Source Type: blogs
Holiday Blogging
Starting today, blogging here will move to the irregular holiday schedule. Look for recipes and the like over the next couple of weeks, interspersed with occasional relevant topics as they come up. I hope everyone with a break has a good one - I'll be working The Chemistry Book and the Things I Won't Work With collection (as well as lounging around, naturally).
I'd also like to thank everyone who's bought through the Amazon links in the "Science Gifts" posts I've put up in the last couple of weeks. The commission loot is very much appreciated, and I pledge to use it wisely. Fairly wisely. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 20, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Book Recommendations Source Type: blogs
Picking Diverse Compounds
Diversity deck, diversity set, diversity collection: most chemical screening efforts try to have some bunch of compounds that are selected for being as unlike each other as possible. Fragment-based collections, being smaller by design, are particularly combed through for this property, in order to cover the most chemical space possible. But how, exactly, do you evaluate chemical diversity?
There are a lot of algorithmic approaches, and a new paper helpfully tries to sort them out for everyone. Here's the take-home:
We assessed both the similar behavior of the descriptors in assessing the diversity of chemical libraries, ...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 20, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: In Silico Source Type: blogs
Bristol-Myers Squibb Exits Diabetes
As the Wall Street Journal reported last night, Bristol-Myers Squibb is getting out of the diabetes business entirely, selling its collaboration with AstraZeneca back to AZ.
As part of the transaction, and subject to local consultation and legislation, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca anticipate that substantially all employees of Bristol-Myers Squibb dedicated to the diabetes business will be transferred to AstraZeneca. A number of R&D and manufacturing employees dedicated to diabetes will remain with Bristol-Myers Squibb to progress the diabetes portfolio and support the transition for these areas. Bristol-Myers Squ...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 19, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Diabetes and Obesity Source Type: blogs
More Worthless Press Releases
To go along with those nominations for worst press releases of the year, here's a roundup of stinkers in the biomedical field. And they do reek. I got some of these in my in-box as well, and I probably got even more of them than I remember. Sad to say, PR material (or at least the automated list variety) gets a very brief look from me. If there's a personal note to it, that shows that some thought went into the distribution, odds go up. But even then, I get people pitching me on all-natural coconut cure water and the like, apparently laboring under the idea that it's just the think that the readership here would like to he...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 18, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Press Coverage Source Type: blogs
Press Release Fraud - The Verdict Stands
The Harkonen/Intermune case (blogged about here) seems to have come to a resolution (or no resolution, depending on your viewing angle): the Supreme Court has declined to hear W. Scott Harkonen's appeal. So the original verdict (and the rejection of its appeal) stand, and the argument that the disputed press release was merely a scientific argument fails. I agree with that, because this case seemed pretty egregious, but it might have been nice to see what the Supreme Court thought about the issue. The problem is, when you invite that, you get to, well, find out what the Supreme Court thinks about the issue. And like the ol...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 18, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Dark Side Source Type: blogs
Lab Mice Are Being Kept Too Cold, Apparently
This study looked at several sorts of tumorigenesis, but only for solid tumors, so the effects on leukemia, etc., are still unknown. You'd have to think, though, that several other disease areas could be affected by this situation as well - for example, how much of the uselessness of mice in inflammation models is caused by these changes? I'm simultaneously glad to see these things being uncovered, while being worried about how long it's taken to uncover them: what else are we missing? (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 18, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Animal Testing Source Type: blogs
A Look Under the VC Hood For 2013
Here's an interesting year-end list - from Bruce Booth at Atlas Venture, it's the list of seed-stage biotech companies that they've funded this year. Unless you're a very, very close follower of the field, you'll never have heard of most (or all) of them, but all the biotech/small pharma companies you've heard of have been at this stage at some point.
What's also interesting is the upfront admission that only about half of these, at the most, are going anywhere, and (as Booth says) some of them are "already trending negative". In that business, if some of your bets aren't "trending negative", then you aren't making enough...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
GlaxoSmithKline's New Sales Practices
GSK has announced that they're going to change the way their sales and marketing organization does business, and how they compensate people in it. They're removing all individual numerical targets for their sales reps worldwide, for one thing, following up on changes they made to the system in the US a couple of years ago. I don't know how that's worked out here, in the real world, so I can't comment much on that one.
A big change, though, is that the company has announced that it:
". . .will move to end the practice of paying healthcare professionals to speak on its behalf, about its products or disease areas, to audie...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
A Year-End Review at Xconomy
Here's another look back at biotech's state in 2013, from Luke Timmerman. He's using the well-known "hype cycle" to evaluate where various topic and companies stood: are they in the Peak of Inflated Expectations, the Trough of Disillusionment, the Slope of Enlightenment, or the Plateau of Productivity? (These always sound like locations out of John Bunyan to me, which is not altogether inappropriate).
I think he's right that the hottest area right now are the immunotherapies, which have been notching up some dramatic results. But much as I'd like them to, I don't think that they're going to be able to march through the re...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Worst Scientific Press Releases of 2013?
In the same spirit as Adam Feuerstein's "Worst Biotech CEO" nominations from the other day, here's Michael Eisen asking what the worst scientific press releases of the year were. Most Overhyped and Most Egregious Failure to Cite Earlier Work are two especially hard categories to win. If you have some examples that particularly got under your skin this year, head on over. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 17, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Press Coverage Source Type: blogs
Top Chemical Publications of 2013
From Organic Solution, here's a list of the top chemical papers of 2013. If I were to make my own list, some of the papers on this one would certainly overlap. Other people will have different ones, though, and I'd be glad to link to them as well - I'll update this post with any suggestions that come in for other selections. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 16, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
NIH Taking on More RIsk?
You'd have to think that this is at least a step in the right direction: "NIH to experiment with high-risk grants":
On 5 December, agency director Francis Collins told an advisory committee that the NIH should consider supporting more individual researchers, as opposed to research proposals as it does now — an idea inspired in part by the success of the high-stakes Pioneer awards handed out by the NIH's Common Fund.
“It’s time to look at balancing our portfolio,” says Collins, who plans to pitch the idea to NIH institute directors at a meeting on 6 January.
The NIH currently spends less than 5% of its US$30-bill...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 16, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Who Discovers and Why Source Type: blogs
Erythropoetin From Scratch
The Danishefsky group has published their totally synthetic preparation of erythropoetin. This is a work that's been in progress for ten years now (here's the commentary piece on it), and it takes organic synthesis into realms that no one's quite experienced yet:
The ability to reach a molecule of the complexity of 1 by entirely chemical means provides convincing testimony about the growing power of organic synthesis. As a result of synergistic contributions from many laboratories, the aspirations of synthesis may now include, with some degree of realism, structures hitherto referred to as “biologics”— a term used t...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 13, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
Free Chemical Patent Searching
Here's some good news for open (free) access to chemical information. A company called SureChem was trying to make a business out of chemical patent information, but had to fold. They've donated their database to the EMBL folks, and now we have SureChEMBL. At the moment, that link is taking me to the former SureChem site, but no doubt that's changing shortly.
This will give access to millions of chemical structures in patents, a resource that's been hard to search without laying out some pretty noticeable money. This isn't just the database dump, either - the software has been donated, too, so things will stay up to date:...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 13, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
