- Here are two rather related stories that I’d like to bring together. The first is this very interesting article from Bloomberg on the humble nitrile glove, companion to laboratory and medical workers around the world, not to mention food service, security, and more. (There’s an archive link to the article up here). As you might have surmised, these gloves are almost entirely a made-somewhere-else item (at the moment, mostly Malaysia with raw materials from China), and for some years now […]
- I wrote here a few years ago about the rather startling idea of purifying crude oil (and such mixtures) by doing something other than distilling them, which takes out progressively high-boiling fractions. You can get pretty far that by that technique (waves hands around the horizon at all of modern civilization, which is in several ways built on hydrocarbon fractionation), but it’s a messy, energy-intensive process in itself. And it produces significant waste itself, not least of which are large […]
- Here’s a very nice structural biology paper on an important target, telomerase. This has become a famous enzyme over the years because of its role in maintaining a crucial part of chromosomal structure, the eponymous telomeres. Those are the “end caps” of chormosomes, and it’s not surprising that they come in for some special treatment. Just leaving open reading frames out there seems like an invitation for trouble (from several possible mechanisms), and evolution has apparently come to that conclusion […]
- I can’t resist writing about the “SpudCell” preprint that’s made some news the last few days – after all, I have a whole blog category aimed at this sort of thing. And it also lands in my domain because of the way it starts out: “Cells are the fundamental unit of life. Yet there is no natural cell for which all its life-essential functions are understood”. If anything, that’s an understatement, and you can imagine the situation as you move […]
- This is kind of a tough read, but a necessary one. It’s from a Canadian oncologist, on the glossing-over of harms and side effects in oncology trials, and you can sense the frustration from the author. That’s not surprising, because he’s warned about just this issue before, and apparently to little effect. It really is a problem. Everyone knows that cancer treatment is hard on the patients, and frankly there are many drugs in that area with side effects that […]
- I’d like to update the situation described in this post and its follow-up. The first is a look at just how the Trump administration is trying to destroy federally-funded research in the US as we know it and replace it with cronyism and worse, and the second is a rather urgent request for people to speak up about what a truly terrible idea this is. So, has that part happened? To an extent. The AAAS, to its credit, quickly came […]
- I’ve written several times here over the years about antibody-drug conjugates (most recently here and here), and it’s a field that has seen some ups and downs. Recent years have been more of an upswing, honestly, but I’m starting to wonder if that might be coming to an end. It certainly seems to be doing so over at Pfizer, as reported here at Endpoints. They bought a company specializing in these (Seagen) in 2023 for a cool $43 billion as […]
- When I get asked what areas of drug design are the most amenable to being changed by AI/ML techniques, my general answer is “proteins and antibodies”. That takes no great imaginative leap on my part, because the current protein structure prediction (and protein design) tools are often (although not invariably!) quite impressive – and particularly so compared to the state of the art in small molecules. Antibodies are probably the shortest path to making actual drugs with these tools as […]
- For someone with a reputation as an AI skeptic, I actually have a lot of time for machine learning approaches, at least when pursued with due humility and attention to detail. Science is a vast sea of data, full of currents, seamounts, hidden reefs, archipelagos, and shorelines, and we need all the help we can get in navigating it. And successes in protein structure prediction are evidence enough that if you have a large enough data set, well-curated and covering […]
- First off, a note that posting will be a bit irregular this week, but I wanted to let people know that I'm definitely still around! So here's something to talk about: There's a good new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine looking at a large recent data set in Covid-19 vaccinations in an older population. It's from the Veterans Administration, looking at about one million veterans who got a flu vaccine in 2024, and over three hundred thousand of them also […]
- I’ve written more than once here (most recently last year) about the long-running controversy about what’s happening with very small droplets of water. There have been numerous reports of unusual chemistry under these situations, and I think it’s safe to say that one of the marquee candidates is the reported production of hydrogen peroxide, which is often based on mass spectral evidence. It has to be noted that further investigations did not support hydrogen peroxide generation per se, but numerous […]
- As longtime readers will know, I am always ready to celebrate advances in antibiotic research. That’s for several good reasons, not least of which is that such advances are notoriously hard to come by. And of course they’re also extremely important from a public health perspective: we are under constant threat from pathogenic infections, and the organisms that cause them are getting steadily more resistant to our existing treatments. At this point the only people in the industrialized world who […]
- Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a terrible disease, made worse by the fact that biomedical science can do so little about it. The lung tissue (particularly around the air sacs gradually becomes thicker and stiffer as scar tissue builds up around them, and this naturally causes a decline in lung function. As you can tell from the name, the actual cause of the disease is not understood, but the effects certainly are: average life expectancy after diagnosis is about four […]
- Those of you who lived through the worst of the “Rule of Five” era in medicinal chemistry will well appreciate that we are working with a lot of compounds now that cheerfully violate some of those strictures. Molecular weight might be the first on the list, thanks to the number of large bifunctional molecules (for targeted protein degradation and other ideas) that have been in development. In retrospect, there were people (and departments, and whole companies) that put blinders on […]
- There are two really interesting papers that have come out that give us some very badly needed insights into “Long Covid”, which we can define as a constellation of symptoms that persist many weeks after a coronavirus infection. Most people recover quite well – I’ve had the damn virus more than once myself and haven’t noticed any particular long-term effects. But not everyone is so fortunate! Estimates are fuzzy, but there are millions of people worldwide who are dealing with […]
- So I wrote the other day about the severe damage the Trump administration has done to US federally funded science, and mentioned the even more severe damage they are planning. This is contained in an irritatingly lengthy and gassy Office of Management and Budget proposal, which boils down to some key horrible ideas (summarized, for example, by Elizabeth Ginexi here) and at BioCentury here (free link). Section 200.205 will require that political appointees (and not professional staffers at any granting […]
- I have written a number of times about what’s happening to federal funding of scientific research in the US, but I have some updates, and they are grim. Let’s first consider the policies reported here at Science on collaboration with scientists and institutions outside the US. It appears that the NIH and NASA (so far) want permission in advance for any such proposal, with grantees also saying that they have been directed to remove papers with foreign co-authors from their […]
- There are a couple of very interesting AI-assisted-chemistry paper out this week, and I have been trying to find the time to take them on. Let’s do this one first. It’s a report on “Co-Scientist”, a system to help propose hypotheses, potential mechanisms, et al. for biomedical discovery. The authors first applied this in what I think is a good test bed for it: drug repurposing. Let’s put aside the not-all-that-high success rates seen in these efforts, because nothing in […]
- I wasn’t posting over the long weekend, so I missed the saga of the Garden Grove methyl methacrylate tank. The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately, but let’s talk about it to illustrate some widely applicable chemistry. People wrote to me to ask if methyl methacrylate itself is on my “Things I Won’t Work With” list, but it’s a long way from being in that category, to be honest. I’ve worked with it, as well as related compounds like methyl […]
- I’m working on a big post or two, but I did want to get something up today. Have a look at this rather disturbing news from the mouse model world, published here at Science. The authors went to the trouble of genotyping 611 mice tissue samples representing 341 strains at the MMRRC (Mutant Mouse Resource and Research Centers), and as the paper notes, rather dryly and through pursed lips, “Users’ expectations for congenic strains based on nomenclature are not consistently […]
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