The Haystack
Sep 3rd, 2010Ask Your Doctor How To Make A Pharma Commercial
[youtube]UTpaABPUMWY[/youtube] Things are winding down here at The Haystack in anticipation of the long Labor Day weekend. But I thought I'd share a video of a Pfizer commercial from Canada that caught my eye- it's part of an in-depth post at PhD biochemist Jovana J. Grbic's ScriptPhD blog, which is all about the intersections of research, pop culture, and the media. I'll leave the in-depth analysis to ScriptPhD, but I thought this commercial played out Continue reading →
By Carmen Drahl • no commentsNewscripts
Sep 2nd, 2010Fragrance Overload?
[caption id="attachment_7452" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Credit: Pascal Blachier via Wiki commons"][/caption] When humanity’s predilection for perfume meddles with the sense of smell of insects and animals, it can sometimes be fortuitous. Case in point: the discovery that Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume lures jaguars, tigers, and other big cats to expectant nature photographers and videographers. But meddling with odor receptors of other creatures can prove problematic. For example, the cosmetic and food fragrance 1-methylbutyl 3-methylbutanoate elicits aggressive defense behaviour in Continue reading →
By Sarah Everts • 5 commentsThe Chemical Notebook
Sep 2nd, 2010Industrial Gas Companies Face Brazilian Fine Muito Grande
The Brazilian antitrust authority, Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica (CADE), is levying fines totaling about $1.7 billion against Air Liquide, Air Products, Linde, Praxair’s Brazilian subsidiary White Martins. It has also implicated seven managers of those companies. CADE says it found evidence, through wire taps and searches, of an elaborate arrangement to divvy up the market by assigning customers to particular industrial gas companies. “CADE understands the actions of those companies that were investigated resulted Continue reading →
By Alex Tullo • 11 commentsCleantech Chemistry
Sep 2nd, 2010An Early Harvest of Biofuels News
Here it is, the second day of September, and I've got a small pile of releases here about goings-on in the biofuels industry. Venture Capital maven and biofuels booster Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures is backing the first three companies in this roundup. [caption id="attachment_240" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Renewable Crude by KiOR, Credit: KiOR"][/caption] First I need to go back in time a little bit (to Aug. 17) and commend Range Fuels on getting its commerical cellulosic Continue reading →
By Melody Voith • 8 commentsTerra Sigillata
Sep 1st, 2010Physical exhaustion and scientific creativity
I've just received the print version of The Chronicle of Higher Education and just have to share this with those of you who read our weekend post about being tormented by lab directors who aren't keen on non-science activities. In this front page article, "Running Jogs the Academic Mind," by Don Troop, several academicians hold forth on the value of physical activity, running in particular, as a means to trigger thinking about research problems. Religious Continue reading →
By David Kroll • 12 commentsThe Safety Zone
Sep 1st, 2010Lab horror stories
Care to share your favorite lab accident? There's a call out over at the chemistry reddit for your lab horror stories. An example: Two postdocs were working in the glovebox next to me. They spilled some MeLi and were mopping it up with kimwipes. They knew it would be dangerous when they pulled it out of the antechamber, so they prepared an EtOH bath (which, to be fair would safely neutralize a small amount of Continue reading →
By Jyllian Kemsley • one commentJust Another Electron Pusher
Aug 30th, 2010Profile: …cartoonist?
The guy that I’m profiling for the blog today isn’t a chemist. At all. But he’s Jorge Cham, so does it matter? In case you’ve been living under something inorganic and heavy (or not a grad student), Cham is the creator of Piled Higher & Deeper, a comic strip about the...uniqueness... of graduate student life. He gave his “Power of Procrastination” talk at ACS last week, and I managed to drag him into a quiet Continue reading →
By Leigh Krietsch Boerner • no commentsThe Editor's Blog
Aug 30th, 2010Forum On Climate Change
Nearly 200 people attended the ACS Forum on Science & Consequences of Climate Change on Monday, Aug. 23, during the Boston national meeting. The forum was sponsored by the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI) and was an ACS Presidential Event. It was moderated by Charles Kolb, president and CEO of Aerodyne Research and chair of CEI. The forum was one component of CEI’s review of the ACS position statement on global climate change. Position Continue reading →
By Rudy Baum • 11 comments
Ask Your Doctor How To Make A Pharma Commercial
Things are winding down here at The Haystack in anticipation of the long Labor Day weekend. But I thought I’d share a video of a Pfizer commercial from Canada that caught my eye- it’s part of an in-depth post at PhD biochemist Jovana J. Grbic’s ScriptPhD blog, which is all about the intersections of research, pop culture, and the media.
I’ll leave the in-depth analysis to ScriptPhD, but I thought this commercial played out like a mini-movie. I wonder what kind of feedback Pfizer will get on this “More Than Medication” campaign.
Fragrance Overload?
Credit: Pascal Blachier via Wiki commons
When humanity’s predilection for perfume meddles with the sense of smell of insects and animals, it can sometimes be fortuitous. Case in point: the discovery that Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume lures jaguars, tigers, and other big cats to expectant nature photographers and videographers. But meddling with odor receptors of other creatures can prove problematic. For example, the cosmetic and food fragrance 1-methylbutyl 3-methylbutanoate elicits aggressive defense behaviour in hornets. Sometimes people meddle with an insect’s ability to smell sexual pheromones as a means to combat invasive species. In 2007, California’s agricultural industry tried spraying an overwhelming amount of invasive moth species pheromone onto fruit crops because they hoped the signal overload would confuse the male moths and disrupt the species’ mating cycle–a solution that led to serious controversy.
The question that Richard Bolek, a PhD student, and his adviser, Klaus Kümmerer, at the University of Freiburg Medical Center, in Germany, want answered is whether some of the fragrances we use—in perfumes, personal care products, and cleaning agents, which get released into the air or down the drain–are inadvertently interrupting some of the chemical communication networks that benign or beneficial insects and animals rely on. Continue reading →
Industrial Gas Companies Face Brazilian Fine Muito Grande
The Brazilian antitrust authority, Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica (CADE), is levying fines totaling about $1.7 billion against Air Liquide, Air Products, Linde, Praxair’s Brazilian subsidiary White Martins. It has also implicated seven managers of those companies.
CADE says it found evidence, through wire taps and searches, of an elaborate arrangement to divvy up the market by assigning customers to particular industrial gas companies.
“CADE understands the actions of those companies that were investigated resulted in grave damage to industry and the public health of Brazilians,” the regulator said in a statement. (Warning: I translated that myself.)
White Martins faces the largest fine, $1,273 million. Air Liquide is on the hook for $143 million. Air Products is looking at $130 million. And Linde may be responsible for $137 million.
The fines made Praxair mad. “Praxair strongly believes that the allegations of anticompetitive activity against our Brazilian subsidiary are not supported by valid and sufficient evidence,” the company said in a statement. “We further believe that the fine represents a gross and arbitrary disregard of Brazilian law.” The firm promises that it will “prevail on appeal.”
To Laurence Alexander, an equity analyst that covers Praxair for Jeffries & Co., the fine isn’t a shocker. “The threat of potential sanctions has been apparent since 2004, when CADE announced an investigation into alleged price fixing on public tenders as part of a broader government initiative to ‘help tame inflation’,” he wrote to clients. Alexander expects appeals to drag out five to ten years.
An Early Harvest of Biofuels News
Here it is, the second day of September, and I’ve got a small pile of releases here about goings-on in the biofuels industry. Venture Capital maven and biofuels booster Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures is backing the first three companies in this roundup.
Renewable Crude by KiOR, Credit: KiOR
First I need to go back in time a little bit (to Aug. 17) and commend Range Fuels on getting its commerical cellulosic biofuels plant up and running near Soperton, GA. Range Fuels uses thermochemical processes (heat, pressure and steam) to convert woody biomass to synthesis gas (often called syngas). The gas is passed over a catalyst to produce mixed alcohols. The current product of the Soperton plant is methanol, which will be used to produce biodiesel. The plant will also have ethanol output beginning in the third quarter, according to the company.
Its been a long road for Range. (Though the commerical-scale biofuel road will be even longer for most other firms, as commercial facilities are as rare as ice in the Sahara [or you can insert your own lame metaphor]) Continue reading →
Orexigen Partners With Takeda for Potential Obesity Drug Contrave
This morning Orexigen Therapeutics became the second of the three leaders in the obesity drug race to partner with a larger company. They’ve successfully courted Takeda, which now gets exclusive marketing rights to obesity drug Contrave in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, if the drug gets regulatory approval. Orexigen’s shares soared on the news, first released in the pre-dawn hours this morning.
In the deal, Orexigen gets $50 million upfront from Takeda and could nab up to $1 billion more, depending on whether Contrave meets certain regulatory and sales milestones. Further details about the agreement are available on an Orexigen press release.
Contrave refresher: Contrave is a combination of two drugs already on the market: naltrexone, which is typically used to manage alcohol or opioid dependence, and the antidepressant bupropion. Orexigen’s developed a sustained-release formulation of those active ingredients. This is thought to alleviate the nausea that cropped up in clinical trials, but also could come in handy in terms of real-world prescriptions if the drug is approved. People might want to save money by taking the generic versions of Contrave’s two components but it isn’t clear how that would work for them.
In July we covered the first partnership deal in the obesity drug race, that of Eisai and Arena Pharmaceuticals, which is developing the obesity drug candidate lorcaserin. It’s worth stepping back to compare and contrast the deals. Continue reading →
Bayer to Eliminate Unsightly Chin Fat
As my husband and I recently looked through photos of our wedding, he kept repeating the same thing: “Yikes, check out my triple chin.” Click. “Another triple chin.” Click. “Hmm, maybe I need to work out.”
In reality, his perceived folds of flab were a result of unfortunate camera angles (I swear, dear. Your chin is splendid.). But if a day comes when he genuinely suffers from chin bulge, Bayer might have just the solution. Yesterday, the company agreed to fork over $43 million upfront and upwards of $300 million in milestone payments for Kythera Biopharmaceuticals’ ATX-101, an adipolytic agent “designed to reduce small volumes of facial fat.” Yes, that’s right, folks: it’s a chin fat drug.
Because I tend to cover pharmaceuticals that are more in the disease-modifying category rather than those in the aesthetics-modifying category, I was pretty shocked by the price tag. Then I took a look at Allergan’s sales forecast for its wrinkle smoother Botox—the company is predicting it will bring in about $1.3 billion this year. (Well, that’s before subtracting out the $600 million Allergan agreed to pay today to settle criminal and civil charges related to the marketing of Botox.)
In other words, the potential market for ATX-101 seems pretty vast. Indeed, I imagine my husband isn’t the only one to look at a photo (poorly angled or not) and cringe. ATX-101 is in Phase II studies, and seems to be administrated in a relatively painless injection.
All this made me wonder how one goes about getting rid of small fat deposits without, well, sucking them out. It looks like the folks at Kythera, which is conveniently based in Los Angeles, first thought the active component in the formulation of ATX-101 was phosphatidylcholine, a major component of biological membranes that sports a polar head and fatty acid tails. However, further studies showed that deoxycholate, a secondary bile acid put into the formulation to make the phosphatidylcholine micelles soluble, was actually the secret to getting rid of unsightly chin fat. Deoxycholate, a detergent, causes a shift in the osmotic balance of a cell–in other words, water rushes into the fat cell, causing it to burst. The finding was curious, as deoxycholate appeared to be only affecting fat tissues when administered in vivo. Kythera eventually determined that deoxycholate isn’t necessarily selective for fat cells, but that tissues in the subcutaneous fat that are protein rich are resistant to its effects. Hence, when administered locally, it appears to be able to get rid of the fat without impacting other tissues. And there you have it, drug goes in, fatty chin goes out. Since later stage trials are pending, the chin-fat sensitive will have to stick to photoshop for now.
Physical exhaustion and scientific creativity
I’ve just received the print version of The Chronicle of Higher Education and just have to share this with those of you who read our weekend post about being tormented by lab directors who aren’t keen on non-science activities.
In this front page article, “Running Jogs the Academic Mind,” by Don Troop, several academicians hold forth on the value of physical activity, running in particular, as a means to trigger thinking about research problems.
Religious “pilgrims have long understood this,” says Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor of history and constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania and an avid runner. “You have to exhaust the physical self first. You really have to get kind of empty, and then it all roars in.” Ms. Gordon says that every chapter of her new book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010), contains an insight gained on one of her long runs.
Lab horror stories
Care to share your favorite lab accident? There’s a call out over at the chemistry reddit for your lab horror stories. An example:
Two postdocs were working in the glovebox next to me. They spilled some MeLi and were mopping it up with kimwipes. They knew it would be dangerous when they pulled it out of the antechamber, so they prepared an EtOH bath (which, to be fair would safely neutralize a small amount of MeLi, iPrOH would have been better). One postdoc opens the antechamber and, as quickly as possible, took the kimwipes out and dunked them in the EtOH bath, only problem was, the kimwipes burst into flames as soon as the kimwipes were exposed to air, setting the bath on fire. In the panic, one of the postdocs went to get MORE ETOH and poured it on the fire. The bath overflowed, she started yelling for liquid nitrogen, I got out of my box and started running towards the liquid nitrogen. The next thing I know, i hear screaming, the postdoc walks out of the lab (right under a safety shower, without pulling the water release) with her entire pantleg on fire. I cant find LN2 so I take off her labcoat and snuff out the fire on her leg. The other postdoc managed to put out the EtOH fire, but he didnt remember how he did it. They both went to the hospital, one of them stayed for 2 weeks. That was my first summer in a lab, right before sophomore year.
Recent Comments