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 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
- Opinion
Ruling out the rule of five
Simple calculations for clinical trial success failed to find a winning formula
- 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
- 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
