The Old AstraZeneca Charnwood Site
Trying to find tenants for the former AstraZeneca campus at Charnwood. A few buildings are being demolished to make room, and they're hoping for biomedical researchers to move in. I hope that works; it seems like a good research site. I'm not sure that trying to sell it as ". . .perfectly located between Leicester, Nottingham and Derby" is as good a pitch as can be made, but there are worse ones. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 4, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Industry History Source Type: blogs
More Vaccine Fearmongering
Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus is an excellent overview of the vaccine/autism arguments that raged for many years (and rage still in the heads of the ignorant - sorry, it's gotten to the point where there's no reason to spare anyone's feelings about this issue). Now in this post at PLOS Blogs, he's alerting people to another round of the same stuff, this time about the HPV vaccine:
Over a period of about a month, (Katie Couric's) producer and I spoke for a period of several hours before she told me that the show was no longer interesting in hearing from me on air. Still, I came away from the interaction somewhat heartened...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 4, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Autism Source Type: blogs
Cancer Cell Line Assays: You Won't Like Hearing This
Here's some work that gets right to the heart of modern drug discovery: how are we supposed to deal with the variety of patients we're trying to treat? And the variety in the diseases themselves? And how does that correlate with our models of disease?
This new paper, a collaboration between eight institutions in the US and Europe, is itself a look at two other recent large efforts. One of these, the Cancer Genome Project, tested 138 anticancer drugs against 727 cell lines. Its authors said at the time (last year) that "By linking drug activity to the functional complexity of cancer genomes, systematic pharmacogenomic prof...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 4, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
Science Gifts: Running Experiments at Home
Interesting science-gift ideas can be found in the "home experiments" area. There's been a small boom in this sort of book in recent years, which I think is a good thing all the way around. I believe that there's a good audience out there of people who are interested in science, but have no particular training in it, either because they're young enough not to have encountered much (or much that was any good), or because they missed out on it while they were in school themselves.
Last year I mentioned Robert Bruce (and Barbara) Thompson's Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments along with its sequels, the Illustra...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 3, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Science Gifts Source Type: blogs
What You Can Publish After a Shamectomy
The sleazy scientific publishing racket continues to plumb new depths in its well-provisioned submarine. Now comes word of "Stringer Open" - nope, not Springer Open, that one's a real publisher of real journals. This outfit is Stringer, which is a bit like finding a list of journals published by the American Comical Society. The ScholarlyOA blog noticed that the same person appears on multiple editorial boards across their various journals. When contacted, she turned out to be a secretary who's never heard of "Stringer". Class all the way. The journals themselves will be populated by the work of dupes and/or con artists - ...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 3, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Merck's Drug Development in The New Yorker
The New Yorker has an article about Merck's discovery and development of suvorexant, their orexin inhibitor for insomnia. It also goes into the (not completely reassuring) history of zolpidem (known under the brand name of Ambien), which is the main (and generic) competitor for any new sleep drug.
The piece is pretty accurate about drug research, I have to say:
John Renger, the Merck neuroscientist, has a homemade, mocked-up advertisement for suvorexant pinned to the wall outside his ground-floor office, on a Merck campus in West Point, Pennsylvania. A woman in a darkened room looks unhappily at an alarm clock. It’s 4 ...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 3, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Development Source Type: blogs
Authorship For Sale. Papers For Sale. Everything For Sale.
Academic publishing fraud in China has come up here before, but Science has an in-depth look at the problem. And a big problem it is:
"There are some authors who don't have much use for their papers after they're published, and they can be transferred to you," a sales agent for a company called Wanfang Huizhi told a Science reporter posing as a scientist. Wanfang Huizhi, the agent explained, acts as an intermediary between researchers with forthcoming papers in good journals and scientists needing to snag publications. The company would sell the title of co–first author on the cancer paper for 90,000 yuan ($14,800). Add...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 2, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Dark Side Source Type: blogs
Eisai Cuts Back
Getting the week off to a bad start is this news from Eisai. They're stopping small-molecule work at their site in Andover, and (like everyone else, it seems) chopping med-chem at their UK site as well. Worldwide, it looks like a loss of 130 positions. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 2, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Science Gifts: Medicinal Chemistry Books
I hope my readers who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday had a good one. Everything went well here, and there are plenty of turkey leftovers today. My wife always looks forward to a sandwich of turkey in a flour tortilla with hoisin sauce and fresh scallions. I can endorse that one, and I'm also a fan of turkey on pumpernickel with mayonnaise and horseradish. But to each their own! It's a big country, and can accommodate turkey quesadillas, turkey with mango pickle and naan, turkey with barbecue sauce, and who knows what else.
Over the next week or two, as I did last year, I'll be posting some science-themed gift ideas alo...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 29, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Science Gifts Source Type: blogs
Russian Soured Cabbage
Here's a recipe that I'm trying out this year from The Joy of Pickling, an excellent book full of all sorts of pickle recipes. I have a good-sized batch of this going right now, and samples so far confirm that it's good stuff.
1 2 1/2 pound cabbage (1 kilo), shredded
1 tablespoon salt (17 to 18 grams, table or pickling, not kosher, unless you want to adjust the amounts)
1 medium carrot, shredded
1 apple, sliced
1/2 cup cranberries (55g)
1 tablespoon caraway seeds (7g)
Cut the core from the cabbage, save a couple of outer leaves, and shred it. Add the salt to it in a large bowl, mixing it in well and pressing it together...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Thanksgiving: Never Trust An Organic Chemist Who Can't Cook
I wanted to note that I'm home today, and will soon be starting my traditional chocolate pecan pie. If you haven't seen it, that link will lead you to a detailed prep, with both US and metric measurements. It's based on Craig Claiborne's recipe, and he certainly knew what he was talking about when it came to Southern food (and much else besides). I've been making it for twenty years now, and if I didn't, there would be a mutiny around here.
I have a pumpkin pie to make as well, and I'd like to get the base of the gravy going, so it can be turkey-enhanced tomorrow. (As for the turkey, for some years now we've bought a kosh...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
23 And Me And the FDA
As everyone will have heard the personal-genomics company 23 and Me was told by the FDA to immediately stop selling their product, a direct-to-consumer DNA sequence readout. Reaction to this has been all over the map. I'll pick a couple of the viewpoints to give you the idea.
From one direction, here's Matthew Herper's article, with the excellent title "23 And Stupid". Here's his intro, which makes his case well:
I’d like to be able to start here by railing against our medical system, which prevents patients from getting data about our own bodies because of a paternalistic idea that people can’t look at blood test re...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Regulatory Affairs Source Type: blogs
The Freshness Index
One way to look at a drug company's pipeline and portfolio is the "Freshness Index" - how much of its sales are coming from products approved within the past five years. Here's Bernard Munos earlier this year on this topic, where he shows that (too much) revenue lately has been coming from older products. At the time, the figures for the big companies started off with Novartis (19% "fresh" sales), GlaxoSmithKline (12%), J&J (11.8%) and Pfizer (10%).
I bring this up because there's a new look at the freshness index. This one has only products from 2010 or later, and year-to-date sales figures. Under those conditions, it's ...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 26, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Of Mice (Studies) and Men
Here's an article from Science on the problems with mouse models of disease.
or years, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans. Much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people. But Dirnagl and some others suggest there's another equally acute problem. Many animal studies are poorly done, they say, and if conducted with greater rigor they'd be a much more reliable predictor of human biology.
The problem is that the rigor of animal ...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 26, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Animal Testing Source Type: blogs
Lipinski's Anchor
Michael Shultz of Novartis is back with more thoughts on how we assign numbers to drug candidates. Previously, he's written about the mathematical wrongness of many of the favorite metrics (such as ligand efficiency), in a paper that stirred up plenty of comment.
His new piece in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters is well worth a look, although I confess that (for me) it seemed to end just when it was getting started. But that's the limitation of a Viewpoint article for a subject with this much detail in it.
Shultz makes some very good points by referring to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, a book that's come up ...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 25, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Industry History Source Type: blogs
