So gentle reader, the ides of August are upon us.  That means that goals slated for accomplishment this year had better be in sight! If you have a clinical candidate in your goals, you had better have your scale-up worked out and your animals ordered for those remaining pharmacology studies and dose ranging tox and PK. If you have programs finishing up, hopefully the screening campaigns are done, so you can order resupply on the hits and you can validate them before the end of the year and have a chance of getting the work done to start on the hit to lead for next year.  If those hit-to-lead campaigns are supposed to move into lead optimization you had better be seeing your primary assay start to produce results that promise the hope of seeing in vivo activity.  That and the annual ritual of filling out your budget like a kid filling out his Christmas list only to have Santa turn into the Grinch and arbitrarily cut 50% off the top.

Ah the Ides of August!

So I want to offer you some help.  If you are stuck optimizing your leads, Victrix can help with structure based and ligand based methods.  If new chemical matter is what you are looking for, we can pull bioisosteres out that will surprise you. Virtual screening, both structure and ligand based can help bring ideas into play that you haven't thought of.  We can help you mine your HTS data and determine false positives and flag potential false negatives for follow-up.  We can build custom PK and tox models to help you out of your DMPK problems.  

It's so cheap, you can't afford not to. Call us for an evaluation.  We will work with your chemists and biologists to give you access to a state of the art computational chemistry and molecular modeling department that uses the same tools as big pharma and the best computational departments with expertise that is the best in class.  I'm sure you are thinking that you can't afford it.  But you can.  You don't need it all the time.  You only pay for access to the tools and expertise you need, when you need it.  Save you head count for another medicinal chemist who can make compounds or another biologist who can generate precious, precious data.  Let us be your computational group.  The only thing you might miss is that sinking feeling when this year’s goals slip out of sight, and you weren't really looking forward to that anyway, were you?




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Fierce Biotech reports that only thirteen new entities were approved in the first half of the year, but cautions that it may not be as bad as it looks. If you have been reading my blog, you know I am a bit of a contrarian, and I disagree.  It looks bad. These are the drugs predicted to be blockbusters:

Full disclosure:  I work with Collaborative Drug Discovery.  I use and love their product.  You may, therefore, take this post with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I advise you to give the system a solid look.  It is cost effective and easy to use.  If you and your users are familiar with recent generation web apps, you will have an intuitive understanding of the interface.  

Now with that out of the way, What the heck am I talking about? Here is an article on the CDD web site about what is in it for you.  Read it.  Then come back. 

Ok, that was pretty interesting, right?  You see even small startups and academics produce data.  My guess is that if you haven't given this any thought, you are using excel spreadsheets to manage your data.  This is an invitation to disaster.  Registering compounds, tracking their physical properties and biological assay data is something you should be able to do.  You should be able to control access to the data in a straightforward manner. You shouldn't have to pay to maintain an IT infrastructure you don't need.  CDD's cloud based solution addresses all these issues.  Do yourself a favor, and get it today!

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After I posted on, what was in my opinion, a poor use of Nuvigil, several people referred to caffeine as being peddled as a wakefulness enhancer and stimulant for centuries.  True, but caffeine is different neurobiologically than amphetamine like stimulants. 
Amphetamine modulates neurotransmitters in the brain, with the majority of amphetamine effects being exerted on the monoamine neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. Amphetamine most likely has a much broader effect on the brain and central nervous system dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine are just  the most noticeable ones. Amphetamine activity throughout the brain appears to be site-specific. Certain receptors that respond to amphetamine in some regions of the brain tend not to do so in other regions, such as memory formation in the hippocampus. Amphetamine's influence on  neurotransmitter activity specifically in regions implicated in reward explains the behavioral implications of the drug, mainly the  euphoria characteristic of use.

Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world.  I enjoy it in the form of a nice cup of dark roasted coffee of Indonesian or Ethiopian origin.  It is one of those GRAS compounds (generally recognized as safe) that has some pleiotropic effects.

Thus spake Wikipedia: "Adenosine acts as an inhibitor neurotransmitter that suppresses activity in the central nervous system. Consumption of caffeine antagonizes adenosine and increases activity in neurotransmission including acetylcholine, epinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, norepinephrine,cortisol, and in higher doses, endorphins which explains the analgesic effect to some users. At very high doses (exceeding 500 milligrams) caffeine inhibits GABA neurotransmission. This evidence explains why caffeine causes anxiety, insomnia, rapid heart and respiration rate."

So instead of bathing my brain in a bath of dopamine, I'll stick to my coffee.  It has other health benefits as well.   I leave you with Voltaire's response to a comment that coffee was a slow poison.  "It must be.  I've drunk 40 cups a day for the last 50 years and I'm not dead yet"

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