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.
OpinionRegulators must follow their heads, not their hearts
The 2019 US approval of antibiotic Recarbrio seems not to have met the normally expected standards
- Opinion
Will a court overturn abortion drug’s approval?
Tangle between regulation and politics makes uncomfortable viewing from industry
- Opinion
Meeting the tigers of the lab
Practical teaching strikes a balance between removing hazards and learning to respect them
- Opinion
Turning negative results into positives
Publishing unsuccessful experiments is more important than ever as we try to train machines in chemistry
- Opinion
The psychology of our future with AI
It’s time to accept that digitalisation is changing laboratory work, and embrace the opportunity
- Opinion
Setting drug development speed records
The pandemic treatment sprint was spectacular, but hard to match under less unusual circumstances
- Opinion
Embracing oddities
When new chemistry looks like alchemy or witchcraft, it’s worth taking notice
- Opinion
Nobel vision
Looking beyond the here-and-now let click chemistry open up a whole new world of possibility
- Opinion
Do 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?
