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.
OpinionDo science courses need hands-on labs to be effective?
The practical lab is where abstract theory connects to physical reality
- Opinion
Why AlphaFold won’t revolutionise drug discovery
Protein structure prediction is a hard problem, but even harder ones remain
- Opinion
May cause side effects
The dose makes the poison, but understanding unwanted drug interactions is complicated
- Opinion
Alzheimer’s, amyloid and abandoned antibodies
Biogen’s aducanumab is stumbling into obscurity. Where does that leave the amyloid hypothesis?
- Opinion
Catalogues of complexity
The tangled web of fine chemicals supply frequently throws up surprises
- Opinion
Exit strategy
Overcoming a major setback showed Derek Lowe could make it through graduate school
- Opinion
A spanner in the works
Most drugs work by breaking or stopping something, rather than by making something faster or better
- Opinion
Scents and sentimentality
Deprived of familiar lab odours, Derek Lowe indulges in some nasal nostalgia
- Opinion
The shadow of drug resistance
Why do some medicines stop working, and can we avoid it for Covid-19 antivirals?
- Opinion
The law of conservation of data
AI and machine learning are useful and powerful, but they need high quality data inputs that aren’t available yet for drug discovery
- Opinion
Reverse combustion is preparing for takeoff
Where burning hydrocarbons is unavoidable, creating them from atmospheric carbon is a promising option
- Opinion
All work and no play
Is the long-hours culture of academic organic chemistry laboratories finally changing?
- Opinion
Where are the Covid-19 drugs?
Small molecules appear to be lagging behind development of vaccine and antibody treatments
- Opinion
The price of failure
Drug market structures and high R&D failure rates can tempt companies into bad pricing behaviour
- Opinion
Putting combustion into reverse
Unburning carbon dioxide economically and at scale is a tough problem, but potentially world-changing
- Opinion
Opening up a cellular black box
Working out how biomolecular condensates work may reveal a lot about the success or failure of different drugs
- Opinion
The side effects of being unique
Even the largest clinical trials won’t capture all possible bad reactions to a drug – we need pharmacovigilance
- Opinion
A powerful blow against misconduct
Supporting whistleblowers is vital for detecting and preventing bad behaviour
- Opinion
A rough guide to pharma partnership deals
Coronavirus vaccines are driving unusual collaborations with a range of benefits
