Animal Testing: A View From the Labs
Why do we test drugs on animals, anyway? This question showed up in the comments section from a lay reader. It’s definitely a fair thing to ask, and you’d expect that we in the business would have a...
View ArticleWhat Are the Best Med-Chem Books?
I get regular requests to recommend books on various aspects of medicinal chemistry and drug development. And while I have a few things on my list, I’m sure that I’m missing many more. So I wanted to...
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Why You Don’t Want to Make Death-Star-Sized Drugs
I was just talking about greasy compounds the other day, and reasons to avoid them. Right on cue, there’s a review article in Expert Opinion in Drug Discovery on lipophilicity. It has some nice data in...
View ArticleHow Do Drugs Get Into Cells? A Vicious Debate.
So how do drug molecules (and others) get into cells, anyway? There are two broad answers: they just sort of slide in through the membranes on their own (passive diffusion), or they’re taken up by...
View ArticleLessons For a New Medicinal Chemist
I gave my talk at the Drew University Medicinal Chemistry course, and it got me to thinking about when I was there (1990 or 1991), and my early days in medicinal chemistry in general. There are a lot...
View ArticleImproving Half-Life
There was a question in the comments from a reader who’s picking up med-chem, and I thought it was worth answering out here. I’ve been meaning to shore up the “Pharma 101″ category, and this is a good...
View ArticleEating A Whole Bunch of Random Compounds
Reader Andy Breuninger, from completely outside the biopharma business, sends along what I think is an interesting question, and one that bears on a number of issues: A question has been bugging me...
View ArticleA Free Online Med-Chem Course
Erland Stevens at Davidson is going to be running an online med-chem course on EdX, the MOOC platform founded by Harvard and MIT. It starts in October, runs for 8 weeks, can be audited for free, and...
View ArticleWhat Would You Put In a Med-Chem Textbook?
I had an interesting note this morning from a reader who’s been asked about writing an introductory textbook on medicinal chemistry. He’s been looking over the field, and wondering what to include (and...
View ArticleHow Do You Find A New Compound to Patent?
I recently had a question from an interested reader, who’s outside of medicinal chemistry, wondering about how we find room to work in patent space. From his viewpoint, there seemed to be many areas...
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