Drug Hunter offers industry professionals a faster way to find and absorb the latest research and insights in drug discovery. It is a curated collection of the most relevant and transferable scientific knowledge so you can spend less time weeding through the noise and more time turning molecules into medicines. But we also love hearing from you, the drug hunters in the field.

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.

Momelotinib is a JAK inhibitor approved by the FDA in September 2023 for treating myelofibrosis. Last year, the molecule’s co-inventors, Andrew Wilks and Christopher Burns, gave a Drug Hunter Flash talk about the development of this drug with a fascinating mechanism of action.

In celebration of the molecule’s advancement, here we recap their brilliant story, including Wilks’ discovery of the JAK kinases and how he gave them their name, and the long, sometimes fraught journey of momelotinib through several companies before its acquisition and commercialization by GSK.

In a Drug Hunter Flash Talk, Dennis Koester, Director of Medicinal Chemistry at FibroGen, shared an adage credited to the Greek philosopher Epictetus that he wishes his younger self had learned: "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." During this ongoing video series, other scientists, including Chris Burns, Christian Gampe, Katrina (Kate) Jackson, Dafydd Owen, Prof. Richard (Rick) Silverman, and Prof. Andrew Wilks, also talked about what they wished they had learned earlier in their careers.

Small molecule drugs make up most of the drugs we take conveniently as pills, including painkillers like ibuprofen (Advil), antibiotics like penicillin and amoxicillin, or cholesterol-lowering drugs like atorvastatin (Lipitor). The biotechnology revolution allowed scientists to create drugs through genetic engineering and related biological processes, creating a new category of drugs known as “biologics.”...

Dian Su’s journey from chemistry and proteomics to the DMPK of drug conjugates Following a different path comes naturally to Dian Su, Senior Director of DMPK at Bicycle Therapeutics. From a childhood in a small village in China’s northeast Shandong province to her work examining the drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) of antibody-drug [...]

A significant section of the Inflation Reduction Act (H.R. 5376) recently signed into law was targeted at lowering public spending on prescription drugs (Subtitle B: Prescription Drug Pricing Reform). The new laws include Medicare negotiation and includes a provision that disproportionately affects small molecules which have triggered [...]

April 1st, 2023 - Molecule of the Day: Curcumin Curcumin is a component of tumeric, and is sold as an herbal supplement, cosmetics ingredient, food flavoring, and food coloring. The molecule is one of the most widely studied therapeutics in history, with papers, reviews, patents, and other sources citing its potential for treating cancer [...]

Our Drug Hunter subscribers at Curie.Bio recently made headlines with the launch of their new >$500M venture fund with a new model for early-stage biotech financing to help founders launch therapeutics companies. Curie.Bio intends to act not only as an investor, but also as a day-to-day operating partner to help founders choose targets [...]

We recently explored how the lipophilicity (logP) of drugs has changed over time and found that, on average, drugs have become more lipophilic through the decades, primarily attributable to the industry’s move away from natural products. Despite this shift, it is clear from a broad qualitative comparison of structures from past decades to [...]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing data processing, with applications to drug discovery ranging from automating cellular imaging to modeling protein folding . Although numerous startups are developing methods to apply AI-driven drug discovery to develop proprietary assets, a remaining challenge is making these powerful tools [...]

The real magic happens when chemists can integrate computational models into their assay cascades, thanks to trust in their predictions. To get there, grounding computational predictions in physics and experimental reality makes all the difference. In this article, Abba E. Leffler, Ph.D. from Schrödinger tells us about: How to make [...]

This edition of Drug Hunter Letters highlights recent insightful communications from Drug Hunter readers, including: Simon Bury on the History of GSK’s Recently Acquired $1.9B JAK Inhibitor Callie Bryan and Bryan McKibben on Insulin Receptor Partial Agonists and Recent Oncology Highlights Jesse Keicher on CXCR1/2 Antagonists in Treating [...]

As biotech experts, risk taking is part of our business model. Without scientific and business risk, inventions would not occur and businesses would not grow. How do we know we are taking appropriate risks at the right time? How do we know we are using agile drug development strategies by tracking, understanding, and mitigating risk as our [...]

Product development is unique in biopharma in the degree of separation between product developers (R&D scientists) and end users (patients and practitioners). While R&D focuses on questions like “Is it possible to treat this disease?” and “How can we drug this target?”, commercial organizations focus on questions like “Why does a physician [...]

with Julien Lefranc We asked one of our reviewers, Julien Lefranc , about what inspires and excites him about drug discovery. Here, he tells us about an unexpected, moving connection with a cancer patient, and what drives him to work every day. About Julien Julien is a Principal Scientist at Merck KGaA in Darmstadt and is a member of the [...]

Thank you to all of the drug hunters who attended our second drug discovery webinar! You can find the video and slides at the bottom of this page. In part II of this series we covered: Emerging startups, growing drug discovery companies, and IPOs Clinical readouts, positive and negative Big deals and major regulatory actions Check out part [...]

Recently, Dr. Alf Claesson (CEO of Awametox AB, inventor of SpotRM, and previously Principal Scientist and Section Head at AstraZeneca/Astra AB, Sweden) reached out about our resource on the bioactivation of structural alerts . Dr. Claesson shared the helpful notes that: carboxylic acids forming thioesters with CoA might be a greater danger [...]

It was great to see over 100 drug hunters at our first drug discovery webinar! You can find the video and slides at the bottom of this page. The scope of this talk grew to be a bit massive as we were planning it, so we decided to split it into two parts. This first part covered: Interesting tidbits from 2022 Q1's drug approvals Cool facets [...]

Contrary to popular belief, pharma is incredibly competitive, with dozens of companies often working on the same hot target at the same time. What sets pharma apart from the outside world though, is how deeply we respect our competitors and other scientists when they succeed at cracking technical challenges. Here, Dr. [...]

If you’re here reading about drug discovery for fun, you’re probably a drug hunter. You might be someone on your way to a leadership role in pharma or biotech. Maybe you’re decades into your career and already leading an R&D division. You don’t have a PhD in drug hunting, and it’s unlikely to be in your job description. But something makes [...]

New drugs are discovered by teams, not individuals. "Drug discovery is a complex undertaking, and I enjoy the collaboration with many people from different disciplines and expertise areas that it takes to solve this impossible puzzle," says reviewer Joachim Rudolph . Drug Hunter also takes a community to build, and we [...]

There was a hilarious set of memes circulating the internet on scientific papers thanks to xkcd.com’s original comic . Here’s our drug discovery scientist’s parody. Since people expressed an interest in being able to find this again, here it is: Explore drughunter.com for more on drug discovery.

At the time of this writing Kim Huard was one of Genentech’s Senior Scientists, and has spent a decade looking for new medicines.  She spent eight years at Pfizer at the Groton and Cambridge sites before joining us in California. She's currently a Director in the Discovery Chemistry department leading teams of scientists in pursuit of new [...]

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Own Definition. Recently I posted on “biologic drugs” which were approved in 2019 . All was well in my little scientific universe, until I received this in an email: “You recently reported "14 novel biologic drugs," referring to 'novel' biopharmaceuticals approved CDER. But, … You also include [...]

Gleevec (imatinib) was the first tyrosine kinase inhibitor approved for the treatment of cancer and one of the first products to emerge from "rational drug design."  It's invention changed chronic myeloid leukemia from an incurable death sentence to a manageable disease. Here's a look back on the tremendous value it's created over the last [...]