Genervon and ALS: What’s Going On Here?
Ever hear of Genervon, and their ALS therapy, GM604? There’s not too much to hear about, unless of course you’re a desperate patient or relative, looking for something, anything that might help....
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Sulfur, Sulfur, Sulfur
Does anyone know of any phosphatase inhibitors that aren’t hideous? I ask this because someone sent along a question about this paper, from last August, that I’d missed at the time (press release here,...
View ArticleMore on TC-2153
Yesterday’s post on TC-2153 and its assay activity brought a note from Paul Lombroso at Yale, whose group is doing this work. With his permission, here’s an update (slightly edited): We have now used...
View ArticleSome Side Effect For An Antibody
Remember back when AstraZeneca was fighting off Pfizer’s ardent, tax-issue-resolving embrace a year ago? One of their weapons was a pitch to their own shareholders about what potential their own...
View ArticleThe Brain Is Actually Connected to the Lymphatic System
Here’s a surprise: there are lymphatic vessels going into the brain. That’s reported in this paper in Nature. (Here’s a pretty breathless press release from the University of Virginia, where the work...
View ArticleFour Patients. Count ‘Em, Four.
While we’re on the subject of market froth, take a look at what’s going on today. Sage Therapeutics announced the results of a study in post-partum depression. (Note – these are not the same people as...
View ArticleSertraline in the Courts
Potential trouble: thoughts of a link between cardiac birth defects and the antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline). Pfizer recently won such a case in Missouri, but the latest trial seems to have produced...
View ArticleA 3D Printed Drug?
Several readers have sent along news of what’s billed as the “world’s first 3D-printed drug”. That got my attention, because there have been some rather wild predictions about the effects of that...
View ArticleBromodomain Ligands and Memory
Epigenetics has been a hot field the last few years (although not quite hot enough for Roche to buy out their partners in the area, Constellation). One of the things that’s driven a lot of...
View ArticleTarget Invalidation
Target validation is a key process in drug discovery, naturally. But it’s worth remembering that target invalidation happens more often, and is also important. The first project I worked on in the drug...
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Invisible Crystals Yield Structure
A crystallographer colleague passes on this new paper, which I find very interesting and just a bit freaky. The authors (a collaboration between UCLA, HHMI, LBNL, and SLAC) are studying...
View ArticleLoosening Things Up in Japan
Japan is going to try opening up its medical approval process for regenerative medicine (no doubt with an eye on its aging population). Regulatory changes that started taking effect last fall now allow...
View ArticlePrions In the News (Unfortunately)
Let’s talk about proteins for a few minutes – nasty, unfriendly proteins, of the sort that will ball up and crash out of solution the first chance they get. Anyone working in a protein purification lab...
View ArticleBlasting Your Way In
Getting drugs of any sort through the blood-brain barrier is never something that can be taken for granted, and if your therapeutic agents is well outside the usual size/polarity bounds, you can pretty...
View ArticleInto the Numbers
I want to recommend this analysis (at the Mind the Brain blog) of a new paper in PLOS Medicine. The paper is an analysis from a very large Swedish data set of possible links between SSRI antidepressant...
View ArticleDoes An Ancient Retrovirus Have Anything to Do with ALS?
One of the reasons that many people think that organisms can carry around “junk” DNA (that has little or no function) is that up to 8% of our own genomes are remnants of ancient retroviruses. At some...
View ArticleThe Rising Placebo Effect
The placebo effect has many interesting and annoying features, among them the way that it varies so much among different therapeutic areas. There is no placebo effect for a broken leg, or for...
View ArticleSimulating the Brain. Sure Thing.
My mention the other day of Japan’s Fifth Generation computer project prompted a reader to send along this link, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It concerns the Human Brain Project, currently being funded...
View ArticleA Dietary Cause for a Neurodegenerative Disease
This is an interesting paper in itself, and its potential implications are even more so. The authors, from the Institute for Ethnomedicine and the University of Miami, have been studying a...
View ArticleUnpleasant Alzheimer’s News
Here are a couple of new developments in Alzheimer’s and dementia – nothing encouraging, unfortunately. A new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine, from a team that’s looked at multiyear patient records,...
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