It Turns Out They Didn't Want to Give Up Their Kidneys

Derek Lowe has a post at his In the Pipeline blog looking at SGX Pharmaceuticals' foray into phase I trials with a therapeutic that emerged from X-ray crystallographic screening. "Here's a good example of why all of us in the industry tiptoe into Phase I trials, the first-in-man studies," Lowe writes. SGX, now owned by Lilly, took a promising kinase inhibitor into clinical trials last year -- and pulled it just two months later after finding that "higher doses were associated with acute renal failure, something that most certainly hadn't been noticed in the mouse models, or the rats, or the dogs," Lowe says, noting that until that point the drug appeared to be "a perfectly reasonable-looking drug candidate."