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XMRV? Or Umpteen Other Viruses? Or What?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
The long-delayed PNAS paper on the chronic fatigue/XMRV results has finally come out .
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Know How to Make Praziquantel? Tell The World.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
One of the people I met this past weekend was Matt Todd, chemistry professor at the University of Sydney. We talked about a project his lab is working on, and I wanted to help call attention to it
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Unlovely Polyphenols
Monday, May 10th, 2010
Here’s a new paper from the folks at the Burnham Institute and UCSD on a new target for vaccinia virus. They’re going after a virulence factor (N1L) through computational screening, which is a challenge, since this is a protein-protein interaction.
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Dundee’s NMT Inhibitors for Sleeping Sickeness: An Update
Friday, April 9th, 2010
I’ve had some follow-up with the people at Dundee who reported those compounds for sleeping sickness recently. As mentioned, one of the key points in making these a viable therapy will be brain penetration, since trypanosomes in the central nervous system are a hallmark of the most serious phase of the disease. The group has a patent application out ( WO2010026365 ), and you can see from it that they’ve been addressing this problem
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Good News Versus Sleeping Sickness
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Nature has a very encouraging paper out today on some potential treatments for trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). The mechanism is protein N-myristoylation (catalyzed by an enzyme abbreviated as NMT) which is a process that’s important for membrane targeting and trafficking. NMT has been shown to be essential for trypanosome survival by siRNA experiments, so it’s a pretty well-validated target
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Chronic Fatigue – Retroviruses to Blame, or Not?
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Chronic fatigue syndrome has long been controversial and mysterious. Is the mystery clearing up, or getting deeper?
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Altermune – Real Stuff or Not?
Friday, May 8th, 2009
Kary Mullis is an outlier among Nobel Prize winners.
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Angiogenesis Inhibitors: Helping or Hurting?
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
Now, here’s something to think about: can angiogenesis inhibitors, the famous class of tumor-starving cancer drugs, actually make some kinds of cancer worse?
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Into the Clinic. And Right Back Out.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
Here’s a good example of why all of us in the industry tiptoe into Phase I trials, the first-in-man studies. A company called SGX, recently acquired by Eli Lilly, has been developing a kinase inhibitor (SGX523) targeting the enzyme cMET.
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Farewell to ACAT, and to Lots of Time and Money, Too
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Back when I joined the first drug company I ever worked for, the group in the lab next door was working on an enzyme called ACAT, acyl CoA:cholesterol acyltranferase. It’s the main producer of cholesterol esters in cells, and is especially known to be active in the production of foam cells in atherosclerosis. It had already been a drug target for some years before I first heard about it, and has remained one.
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