
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.
- Opinion
Stirring in my sleep
Cut off from the lab after 40 years, Derek Lowe returns to the bench in his dreams
- Opinion
The ins and outs of vaccine trials
Derek Lowe lays out how the trials work, and why they get paused and restarted
- Opinion
The Nobel prize that got binned
Ferrocene is a classic example of a discovery that was dismissed as a failed experiment
- Opinion
Blood offering
Antibodies in various forms could bridge the Covid-19 treatment gap until a vaccine is available
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From collaboration to collusion
The US government’s crackdown on academics not declaring Chinese funding highlights a moral hazard
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Dragons of immunology
Anti-inflammatories like dexamethasone are triumphs amid the pitfalls of the immune system
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Does the drug work, or not?
Coronavirus trials reveal the murky reality of disentangling compounds’ effects on human biology
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Vaccine development against the clock
How long will it take to develop a coronavirus vaccine and why is it so hard?
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Why picking projects is like poker
Sometimes you prefer the high-risk, high-reward project to the ‘sure thing’
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Two heads are better than one
Bifunctionals show that sometimes simply tethering two useful molecules together unlocks some useful activity
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Reviewing performance reviews
Assessing the value of researchers’ work is hard, but there are some easy ideas to avoid
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Will computers ever discover drugs from scratch?
With enough understanding and computing power, it should be possible, but will it happen?
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Embracing structural disorder
Medicinal chemists need to overcome their fear of fuzzy proteins
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Has x-ray had its day?
Will the giant of structure determination be toppled by blasts from electron beams?
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Is this a golden age of new drug classes?
A host of new treatment modes are hitting the clinic and the market