Here’s May’s round-up of small molecule highlights, with comments and links to articles below. There was a lot of diversity among targets last month, although there were surprisingly few structure-based campaigns disclosed. Plenty of interesting biology and chemical structures to consider! eFT226 (zotatifin) is a beautiful natural product-derived molecule that inhibits the RNA helicase eIF4A …
April 2020 was another great month for drug discovery publications, with several interesting first disclosures of clinical candidates and a variety of uncommon chemical motifs that will pique most chemists’ interest. Here’s a visual summary of the molecules, with some comments and links to the articles below: Tucatinib is the third approved HER2 kinase inhibitor …
With the all the newsflow on drug re-purposing for the coronavirus, it’s easy to overlook all the interesting drug discovery articles that have been published in March. A summary of some of the most interesting compounds that appeared online this month appears below, and links to the original articles are at the bottom. Two molecules …
It’s hard not to think about infectious diseases at the moment, but it’s a great time to review the drug discovery literature. One area of drug discovery that has deep roots in infectious disease research is targeted covalent inhibition. Targeted covalent inhibitors form covalent bonds with discrete targets (as opposed to non-specific modifiers like nitrogen …
A lot of very interesting drug discovery campaigns have already been published online this year. A summary of some of the resulting small molecules that I found most interesting appears below, including several clinical candidates and many fit-for-purpose biological tool compounds to assess efficacy and toxicity. Grab a coffee and use this post as a …
Of the 2019 biotech IPOs on the major US exchanges, there were 24 companies focused on developing non-small molecule drugs, about the same number as those developing small molecule drugs. Here’s a list of the companies (by market cap at IPO) along with a short summary of the key concepts for each company’s main programs. …