2020, Year of the Chimera?
This post briefly introduces chimeric molecules and companies working on them, contains a list of 10 recent “hot” papers in this field, and some predictions for where chimeras might head. It’s Chinese New Year time, which means a significant part of the global biopharma supply chain has ground to a halt, due to our colleagues…
What is a Biologic Drug Anyway?
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…
Managing Liver Injury (DILI) Risk
Having a clinical drug-induced liver injury (DILI) signal is a surefire way to kill a drug candidate in non-serious indications like pain or chronic indications like diabetes, and will even give oncologists second thoughts as cancer patients are living longer. What can we do to prevent it? A widely accepted strategy for minimizing DILI risk…
The Global Cancer Immunotherapy Pipeline
The global cancer immunotherapy pipeline continues to explode with nearly double the number of active targets in 2019 vs. only two years ago, comprising 3,876(!!) active drugs, with a subset undergoing >5000 active clinical trials. In 2016, I listened to Dan Chen, former Global Head of Cancer Immunotherapy Development at Genentech, comment on the challenge…
Where Do Recent Small Molecule Clinical Candidates Come From?
Modern hit-finding technologies are incredible. Dean Brown and Jonas Bostrom at AstraZeneca have a very nice review out summarizing the hit-finding strategies for 66 clinical candidates published from 2016-2017. Some highlights include a clinical candidate from DNA-encoded libraries at GSK, the discovery of an RNA-binding drug candidate by PTC/Roche, and fragment-based programs with candidates 100,000x…