A Message from Lewis Black

This is very interesting message and I'd like to discuss more about this topic. Since I have PhD in Theoretical Physics and read a lot about Cancer Biology, I can see why regardless of the progress in making modern electronic devices, cure for cancel might not be reachable anytime soon. Very briefly, the iPhone, mentioned in the video, is digital whereas cancer is analog. In terms of theory, there are fundamental theories of physics that are used in making digital devices. In Cancel Biology, and in Biology in general, there is only Central Dogma of Biology (DNA → RNA → Protein), which if we compare to physics, is like a prehistoric time when people were thinking that everything is made of Air, Water, Aether, Fire and Earth.

Drug discovery dilemma and Cura Quartet collaboration.

This is an interesting article published in Drug Discovery Today. The article touches many interesting topics; one of the important is the luck of interest by Rx companies to find possible medical benefits from food sources. I read another interesting article Chemoinformatics - Applications in Food Chemistry which gives a nice review on this topic. Hopefully more will be done in this area .

Does R&D pay?

I read Does R&D pay? article today. There was a similar article Pharmaceutical R&D: the road to positive returns that resulted in an interesting post and comments. I don't think the article answers the question it poses. The take home message for me was that big pharma's are acquiring generic manufacturers instead of investing in R&D.

BioDrugScreen: A Docking Resource for Structure-Based Computational Drug Design

I came across an interesting article about BioDrugScreen. The website is copyrighted by Samy Merouehin and it is build using php. They have done a great job docking NCI diversity set against large number (~1500) of human pdb mostly from Human Cancer Protein Interaction Network. I also learned about LIGSITE, a packet identification tool, that can used to find binding sites similar to ConSurf and SiteHound servers.