Practical Fragments

As the year winds down SARS-CoV-2 continues its relentless drive through Greek letters and the planet. But there is hope: vaccines seem to b...

Pacifichem , the last significant conference of 2021, has just ended. Traditionally held every five years, these meetings usually bring thou...

The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL has been implicated in multiple cancers, and more recently as a possible target for COVID-19. The protein h...

Despite its name, fat mass obesity-associated protein (FTO) is implicated not just in obesity but also cancer and neurological disorders. Th...

Machine learning is becoming increasingly common in drug discovery. Just a few months ago we highlighted its use to design a library of pri...

Earlier this year we highlighted a fragment optimization success story against a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) which made no use of str...

Among the various epigenetic “writers,” only one is capable of trimethylating lysine 36 of histone H3. SET domain-containing protein 2 (SETD...

Since our last clinical update in 2020 two new fragment-derived drugs, asciminib and sotorasib, have been approved, bringing the total to s...

Yesterday, on October 29, the US FDA approved asciminib (ABL001, from Novartis) for two subsets of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia ...

In order to thrive, cancer cells need to evade the immune system. Preventing them from doing so is the goal of cancer immunotherapy . Althou...

Last week we highlighted NMR screens against RNA from SARS-CoV-2. As we noted then, much of the drug discovery action has focused on the vi...

The first mention of SARS-CoV-2 on Practical Fragments in early March of last year highlighted a crystallographic fragment screen against ...

Cambridge Healthtech Institute held its annual Discovery on Target meeting last week. For the first time the event was hybrid, with slightl...

The biotech industry rightly prizes speed: every day people die of diseases we are trying to prevent or cure. And developments can indeed ha...