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 …
This guest post introduces the Topliss schemes for analog synthesis, illustrates when they might be useful, and provides easy-to-use “cheat sheets” of the original schemes. Imagine you’re on a new project that has just conducted a chemical screen on a novel target, and you’re excited to see a few micromolar hits. You want to develop …
Jump to Cheat Sheet Lipophilicity is a drug discovery concept that I didn’t take seriously enough when I first started. It made me focus on the wrong molecules and caused me to design and synthesize buckets of compounds that in retrospect were clearly headed nowhere. This post is here to save you that time. If …
2019 was another big year for novel drug approvals (48 in total) though it wasn’t the record year of 2018 (with 59). The overall explosion in biologic drugs / non-small molecule modalities continued with year with 14 novel biologic drugs, including 3 monoclonal antibodies, a recombinant fusion protein (Reblozyl), 3 ADCs, an siRNA drug (Givlaari), …
2019 was another big year for drug discovery, with 29 FDA novel drug approvals for small molecules[note]Including istradefylline which was first approved in Japan, but not including brilliant blue G, fluorodopa F18, Ga-68-DOTATOC, bremelanotide, afamelanotide, and ferric maltol, which could all be considered small molecules by some definitions: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/new-drugs-fda-cders-new-molecular-entities-and-new-therapeutic-biological-products/novel-drug-approvals-2019[/note] and 3 for antibody-drug-conjugates so far.[note]The …
You’ve probably lived this story before: you’re working on your favorite kinase, YFK1, and are looking for selective inhibitors over YFK2. The problem is, they’re virtually identical near the active site, save for a single residue sitting in the back pocket that your amazing structural biologist has identified. The team thinks you have a better …
Kinase Inhibitor Types Predicted with Machine-Learning Read More »