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.
OpinionDoes the drug work, or not?
Coronavirus trials reveal the murky reality of disentangling compounds’ effects on human biology
- Opinion
Vaccine development against the clock
How long will it take to develop a coronavirus vaccine and why is it so hard?
- Opinion
Why picking projects is like poker
Sometimes you prefer the high-risk, high-reward project to the ‘sure thing’
- Opinion
Two heads are better than one
Bifunctionals show that sometimes simply tethering two useful molecules together unlocks some useful activity
- Opinion
Reviewing performance reviews
Assessing the value of researchers’ work is hard, but there are some easy ideas to avoid
- Opinion
Will computers ever discover drugs from scratch?
With enough understanding and computing power, it should be possible, but will it happen?
- Opinion
Embracing structural disorder
Medicinal chemists need to overcome their fear of fuzzy proteins
- Opinion
Has x-ray had its day?
Will the giant of structure determination be toppled by blasts from electron beams?
- Opinion
Is this a golden age of new drug classes?
A host of new treatment modes are hitting the clinic and the market
- Opinion
Management by numbers
Reducing intellectual processes to metrics runs the risk of people working to the numbers not the goal
- Opinion
Would you buy synthetic wine?
Can we replicate the chemical profiles of famously expensive drinks? And would people drink them?
- Opinion
We’re going to need a bigger flask
Scaling up reactions is easy to get wrong in a variety of ways
- Opinion
What are the rate-limiting steps in drug discovery?
Getting more drugs to market is not just a chemistry problem
- Opinion
How science shapes our psychology
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?
Nano- and macromolecular science might make for a shocking read in the launderette
- Opinion
The projects drug companies wish they’d never started
Failures are common in drug research, but some are bigger than others
