Derek Lowe

An Arkansan by birth, Derek got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He’s worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.

Derek writes the popular blog In the pipeline on drug discovery and the pharma industry.

Follow @https://twitter.com/dereklowe

Opinion
Reviewing performance reviews
2020-01-21T14:27:00
Assessing the value of researchers’ work is hard, but there are some easy ideas to avoid
Opinion
A risk not worth taking
2020-01-07T14:28:00
Everyone needs a list of ‘things I won’t work with’
Opinion
Picking the right problems
2019-11-19T14:27:00
Why working on something that’s just ‘interesting’ is not enough
Opinion
Will computers ever discover drugs from scratch?
2019-10-28T14:28:00
With enough understanding and computing power, it should be possible, but will it happen?
Opinion
Embracing structural disorder
2019-09-17T14:29:00
Medicinal chemists need to overcome their fear of fuzzy proteins
Opinion
Has x-ray had its day?
2019-08-14T10:32:00
Will the giant of structure determination be toppled by blasts from electron beams?
Opinion
The silent rise of the robots
2019-07-10T14:28:00
Mechanical helpers have been creeping into our labs for decades
Opinion
Is this a golden age of new drug classes?
2019-06-18T14:27:00
A host of new treatment modes are hitting the clinic and the market
Opinion
It's complicated
2019-05-15T14:27:00
In a complex world, binary answers are often requested but rarely sufficient
Opinion
Management by numbers
2019-04-23T09:30:00
Reducing intellectual processes to metrics runs the risk of people working to the numbers not the goal
Opinion
Would you buy synthetic wine?
2019-03-19T14:27:00
Can we replicate the chemical profiles of famously expensive drinks? And would people drink them?
Opinion
We’re going to need a bigger flask
2019-02-28T14:27:00
Scaling up reactions is easy to get wrong in a variety of ways
Opinion
What are the rate-limiting steps in drug discovery?
2019-01-17T14:27:00
Getting more drugs to market is not just a chemistry problem
Opinion
How science shapes our psychology
2018-12-19T14:27:00
We learn to embrace the unexpected, follow evidence over opinion and accept that most experiments fail
Opinion
What would a 1980s student make of modern research?
2018-11-08T09:27:00
Nano- and macromolecular science might make for a shocking read in the launderette
Opinion
The projects drug companies wish they’d never started
2018-10-10T13:58:00
Failures are common in drug research, but some are bigger than others
Business
Living the lie
2018-09-25T09:27:00
The mind of a serial fraudster must be an odd place indeed
Opinion
Feeding the confusion
2018-08-28T15:05:00
When it comes to working out what foods do to our bodies, mostly we just don’t know
Opinion
How big should your screening collection be?
2018-08-02T10:30:00
We’re going to need a bigger compound deck…
Opinion
'If I'd discovered metformin, I'd have tossed it aside...'
2018-07-09T14:00:00
Trusting our intuition too strongly highlights how little we know about chemical activity