Like many people, I have a shelf that has several of my old high school and college yearbooks on it. The faces and scenes they depict are receding farther back in time, damn it all, and as they do they take on interesting aspects that you couldn't have predicted at the time. In my case, the high school ones are from the late 1970s and the college ones are correspondingly from the early 1980s. The

As has been painfully obvious, small-molecular therapeutics have been largely a missing therapeutic option during the pandemic. Remdesivir got a lot of attention last year - remember those days? - but as better data from larger trials have come in, the excitement has waned. Recently the European DisCoVeRy effort reported on a trial of the drug versus standard of care, with over 800 participants sp

Every so often it's worth revisiting forecasts in this business, to see how things actually worked out. Thomson Reuters has long put out a "Drugs to Watch" list, with projected sales a few years into the future, so let's take a look at the 2016 one and see how their 2020 forecasts actually played out. 1. Obeticholic acid (Ocaliva) - projected sales 2.6 billion, actual sales 0.31 billion. Well, tha

I last wrote about AlphaFold, RoseTTAFold, and the other recent advances in protein structure prediction here. One thing that I (and many others) have emphasized is that these very impressive results have not really come about because of advances in our understanding of protein folding itself. I mean, we do know more about that then ever, but it's not like we suddenly have understood it so much mo

This is a really good article on the history of mRNA vaccines, and I recommend it. I and many others have been emphasizing that we've been very fortunate that so much work had already gone into this area before the pandemic hit - that and the experience we gained during the previous SARS and MERS outbreaks have been absolutely crucial to vaccine development (the latter not just for the mRNA vaccin

There's bad news this morning on the gene therapy front. A small company called Audentes was working on a several gene-therapy approaches in the rare-disease area when they were bought out by Astellas in 2019. Among these was X-linked myotubular myopathy, which is caused by mutations in the MTM1 gene and severely affects the function of skeletal muscle. As the name suggests, it's found almost excl

I've written here several times about the vast amounts of money that have been pouring into biopharma in the last few years - both the ways in which that might not be completely wise, and in the ways where it could well be. But there's a follow-on effect of this boom that's worth thinking about, too and this C&E News article by Rick Mullin is a direct hit on it. All this money is going into fo

Let's jump back into the coronavirus world and cover a question that I (and many others) have been fielding - President Biden's announcement of tougher vaccine mandates in the US are bringing this one up again. The claim is that vaccination is somehow self-defeating, since all we would be doing is putting more selection pressure on the virus to escape vaccine-derived immunity. Why doesn't that jus

ACS Chemical Biology / Nature Chemical Biology / etc.: One of them turns you down, you go to another. It's gotten pretty crowded in this particular cave. ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters: pretty much like J. Med. Chem., just shorter. Perhaps an advantage. Angewandte Chemie: Remember the days when they didn't publish, like, two hundred papers a week? Good times, good times. Biochemistry: y

The topic of drug pricing is never that far away in the news, and it's closer these days than it's been in a while. There's a series of questions, all of which can set off one sort of argument or another. First, are drug prices in the US too high? We will bypass the "Too high for what?" response, although that's not as stupid as it might sound. Note that for this one, you really have to say prescr

It's not news to say that the scientific signal/noise during the coronavirus pandemic has been awful. Vast amount of misinformation (and outright disinformation) circulate constantly, for one thing - about the virus, about vaccines, about other treatments (real and imaginary). In that last category, we have the hydroxychloroquine fiasco, obviously, and many others. A big problem with those stories

Messing around with cytokine signaling is a very large business indeed (because it's a very large area of cell biology as well). We've heard a lot about it during the pandemic, for example, with the too-vigorous immune response that gets many severely infected people into trouble. And that illustrates the balance in modulating such signaling: it's absolutely necessary for the immune pathways to fu

I'd like to recommend this excellent article by Olivia Goodhill at Stat for people wondering how you keep a vaccine up-to-date given the constant emergence of viral variants. It's an exclusive look at Pfizer's Pearl River site, which has that important but extremely demanding assignment, and it's a look at what really is the state of the art in commercial vaccine development. The usual warnings ab

It’s comparatively old news by now, since the blog has been on “upgrade hiatus”. But we’ve recently seen two high-profile departures from prominent positions in the biomedical field due to allegations of sexual harassment. One of those is Aubrey de Grey, the (former) CSO of the SENS Research Foundation. That’s an acronym for “strategies for engineered negligible

OK, as things are lifting off around here, I wanted to address some common questions that have come in. First off, there will indeed be an RSS feed. It's being trouble-shot now, but RSS will indeed continue. Second, the old comments for all the previous posts are indeed going to be carried over, and that's in progress as well. There are. . .quite a few of them, so it may take a bit more time, but

So this will be the last post here until sometime next week, as the entire Science site does a behind-the-scenes changeover to a new publishing platform. Redirects from all old links to the previous posts should be in place on the re-emergence, along with a new look to the blog, a new commenting system, and new blog-writing software back here on this end. Here's hoping everything goes as planned, and I'll see everyone on the other side.

Here's another post that I will regret writing, but a great many people have asked me about a new preprint that brings up the possibility of antibody-dependent enhancement with the current vaccines and the Delta variant. To be frank, some of the people promoting this seem to be rooting for the virus, just so long as it humiliates their enemies and proves their own positions to be correct, but there are a lot of honestly worried people out there who are wondering what this paper means. So let's look at it, with an eye to lessons for evaluating such papers in general.The authors are building on another recent paper (Li et al.) on neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies against the current coronvirus. The preprint version of that one came out in February, and the final version went online in June.

I was mentioning the number of unusual therapeutic modes that are being explored these days, and one of those is (broadly) RNA-based approaches. The ones that directly feed into coding for proteins get a lot of attention (the mRNA vaccines, for example), and everything that's currently approved is some sort of antisense or siRNA species. But RNA being what it is, there are plenty of other things to try.

I was talking with some colleagues the other day about the current funding environment in biopharma, which is. . .well, "robust" might be one word, although some old-timers might prefer words like "crazed".

There are some upgrades going on behind the scenes here, and I wanted to let everyone know that by the end of the month, things will look a bit different. The Science journal family is switching to a single publishing platform (articles, blogs, the lot), and that will mean that the blog will look a bit different, and will be just part of the general Science site, rather than being nominally affiliated with Science Translational Medicine. A new commenting system will be in place as well.The URL here will change: the new address will be coming shortly.