Beginning with the End in Mind: Five Minutes with a Commercial Leader

The Drug Hunter team is piloting a new series highlighting notable disclosures in the patent literature to provide our readers a timely and scientifically flavorful synopsis of therapeutic targets being actively pursued, emerging industry breakthroughs, and fascinating chemical matter. Here we highlight 12 patents published in December 2023 that piqued our interest, and compiled a searchable table comprising key information from more than 180 additional patents of potential interest to drug hunters. If you have any suggestions on how to make this more useful, please let us know!

During Drug Hunter’s Flash Talks, experts talk in-depth about hot topics in drug discovery. These experts also share insights beyond the subjects of their presentations, such as how they got inspired to become a drug hunter, what their favorite molecule is, what excites them most in drug discovery today, and what advice they wish they could give their younger selves. Here is a quick look at some of these insightful nuggets from Flash Talks hosted between January and August 2024.

Drug Hunter has sifted through news articles, press releases, financial disclosures, SEC filings and more to bring you a roundup of 2023's biggest mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the drug discovery world. In this 4-part series we will give you an open-access overview of the M&A landscape, and then for Drug Hunter members in the coming weeks, we will be providing in-depth coverage and analysis of the small molecule-focused (parts 2 & 3) and biologics-based deals (part 4). This premium content includes background on the targets, chemical/biological matter and clinical data driving these deals.

The impact of small and mid-sized biotech companies has become increasingly important. The shift from large pharma dominance to a biotech-driven era of drug discovery presents challenges to the traditional model of education for emerging medicinal chemists. Industry leader Dean Brown recently highlighted challenges for modern medicinal chemists starting in biotech who face fewer mentoring opportunities and are often propelled into leadership positions sooner than their counterparts in big pharma. Here we share how our team of former industry scientists at Drug Hunter can help.

We asked the global drug discovery community to nominate and vote on their favorite molecule from 2022, and the results are in. The 2022 winner, with the most overall votes across the ten finalist molecules , is BMS’ oral, deuterated allosteric TYK2 inhibitor, deucravacitinib, the first new treatment for plaque psoriasis in nearly a decade [...]