Ramblings: July 2021
31 July 2021
Here’s my selected rambles for July 2021.
Vendors/CROs, if you cold call/email me and you don’t get a reply: that’s the reply.
If you saw how much email I got, you’d know I could never respond to all of these kinds of requests. Sorry if that sounds harsh; it’s just reality.
This post reminds me... there's a trend of gotta-be-better-ism in degrader pubs. No, it doesn't. A protein may have e.g. a scaffolding role w/o functional disease relevance. It's acceptable in target validation to learn degrader=inhibitor. And then go work on something else. 🙂
Keith Hornberger @KRHornberger
Not sure if #SynthesisSaturday is a thing for medicinal chemists, but it is now. Great to see progress in some fundamental stuff like electrophilic halogenation. These kinds of things are often harder to do than organic chem textbooks make them seem.
(This is, to my knowledge, the beginning of the #SynthesisSaturday hashtag. I hope it catches on more!)
This is the #1 skill deficit of new PhD hires in pharma IMO — despite most med chemists training as synthetic organic chemists and learning med chem on the job. It was my own biggest weakness. My career only started moving as I wanted when I recognized this and worked on it.
Jen Heemstra @jenheemstra
Jen Heemstra is one of my favorite Twitter follows. She’s the academic mentor that everybody wishes they had back in the day. Her posts about all the stuff that matters besides the science are forever provoking further thought from me. Because she’s in academia, she sees things through the academic lens. It inspires me to draw parallels to industry, and also to think about the interface between industry and academia. Industry is, after all, where the vast majority of chemists are going to wind up for their careers.
💯% on all of this, and I would add: intelligence, even very high intelligence, cannot and should not compensate for being a jerk. It's possible to be both highly intelligent and a decent human. We can learn and do better - one of our great strengths is our ability to learn.
Ash Jogalekar @curiouswavefn
I've been a medicinal chemist for a while now, and I'm pretty certain we already have assay witches. 😜
Chemjobber @Chemjobber
Saddest moment of my first day back: unpacking stuff back into my office, unearthing my notes and textbook from the graduate class I took in quantum chemistry, and realizing I’ve forgotten all quantum chemistry and the associated math. Now I’m just a dumb medicinal chemist. 😢
@GusTheChemist @med_chemist The very hardest lesson every med chemist has to learn early in their career is that they do not and cannot have all the answers. You *need* a team to succeed. Doubly hard when coming out of grad school where building independence to fly solo is a primary goal.
20 years in industry as a medicinal chemist. I feel seen.
Brendan two-jabs done @ChemScrapes
@GusTheChemist @med_chemist I think Derek would argue that the rate-limiter these days is biology. The link between target and disease is often tenuous and not as well-understood as we’d like to think. Way more clinical trials tank these days for lack of efficacy than for a chemistry-related problem.
A wise man (@agwaterson) once told me (paraphrasing): you’ll never get anything done in this business if all possible objections must first be overcome. You can doomsay and angle to kill projects off frequently. You’ll be right 90-95% of the time, and never discover a drug.
Ben B 💙 @ChemBellenie
This post inspired another tweetorial about why medicinal chemists gather PK data on inactive compounds. Legit, people do not understand this mindset sometimes.
@GusTheChemist @brainoscience @matthewherper @med_chemist Drug discovery in neuroscience and psychiatry is approaching a black box. Targets and disease hypotheses abound; clear links to clinical outcomes, less so. Many major pharma players have exited neuro entirely for this reason. And yet… the medical need remains large.
Drug discovery by its nature is a low-probability exercise. You can say no to everything, be right 90-95%+ of the time, and you'll never discover a drug. The whole enterprise requires taking calculated & informed risks every day. Great 🧵 from Bob @med_chemist.
Derek Lowe @Dereklowe