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.
OpinionSetting drug development speed records
The pandemic treatment sprint was spectacular, but hard to match under less unusual circumstances
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Embracing oddities
When new chemistry looks like alchemy or witchcraft, it’s worth taking notice
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Nobel vision
Looking beyond the here-and-now let click chemistry open up a whole new world of possibility
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Do science courses need hands-on labs to be effective?
The practical lab is where abstract theory connects to physical reality
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Why AlphaFold won’t revolutionise drug discovery
Protein structure prediction is a hard problem, but even harder ones remain
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May cause side effects
The dose makes the poison, but understanding unwanted drug interactions is complicated
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Alzheimer’s, amyloid and abandoned antibodies
Biogen’s aducanumab is stumbling into obscurity. Where does that leave the amyloid hypothesis?
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Catalogues of complexity
The tangled web of fine chemicals supply frequently throws up surprises
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Exit strategy
Overcoming a major setback showed Derek Lowe could make it through graduate school
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A spanner in the works
Most drugs work by breaking or stopping something, rather than by making something faster or better
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Scents and sentimentality
Deprived of familiar lab odours, Derek Lowe indulges in some nasal nostalgia
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The shadow of drug resistance
Why do some medicines stop working, and can we avoid it for Covid-19 antivirals?
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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
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Reverse combustion is preparing for takeoff
Where burning hydrocarbons is unavoidable, creating them from atmospheric carbon is a promising option
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All work and no play
Is the long-hours culture of academic organic chemistry laboratories finally changing?
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Where are the Covid-19 drugs?
Small molecules appear to be lagging behind development of vaccine and antibody treatments
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The price of failure
Drug market structures and high R&D failure rates can tempt companies into bad pricing behaviour
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Putting combustion into reverse
Unburning carbon dioxide economically and at scale is a tough problem, but potentially world-changing
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Opening up a cellular black box
Working out how biomolecular condensates work may reveal a lot about the success or failure of different drugs
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The side effects of being unique
Even the largest clinical trials won’t capture all possible bad reactions to a drug – we need pharmacovigilance
