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.
OpinionThe 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
- Opinion
From collaboration to collusion
The US government’s crackdown on academics not declaring Chinese funding highlights a moral hazard
- Opinion
Dragons of immunology
Anti-inflammatories like dexamethasone are triumphs amid the pitfalls of the immune system
- Opinion
Does 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?
