The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog

 

 

  Department of Chemistry, University of Bologna

As Announced, today I'm not going to work at all. I just want say thank you for reading all the boring things I like to write and I wish you, all, a lovely Christmas and a lipid-rich Christmas lunch.

What I don't wish you is to get Christmas disease, which is just another name for Haemophilia B. The pathology was named this way after Stephen Christmas, the first patient with this type of haemophilia to be studied. The article describing it was, amazingly, published in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.

Basically, our blood coagulates thanks to the conversion of fibrinogen to fibrin. This is, however, the very last step of a cascade pathway where many clotting factors are involved: at each step a factor undergoes a proteolysis with a particular and personal enzyme, so that in the achieved active form it could activate the enzyme that'll activate the next factor.

Christmas disease is caused by a deficiency of factor IX (also known as Christmas factor), due to mutations in its gene.
This mutation is sadly inherited, as X-linked recessive trait

The disease is clinically indistinguishable from Haemophilia A, which is the major form of haemophilia.
The therapy is based solely on infusions of recombinant factor IX, which is still rather expensive but widely available.

See you tomorrow night. Until then, all the best!

No serious stuff today: just a little bit of self-promotion (or advertising, perhaps).

From January 1 to 7, we will focus only on drugs acting in the central nervous system.

That's why it is the Psycho Week!

Can you think of better way to kick off a new year?

Another joyful occasion: "In the Pipeline" has put this blog among its links. I would like to thank Derek Lowe: although your blog wasn't in my links, I obviously knew it and used to read your articles.

If you read my last post, you'd probably understood that, from now on, pharmacology is going to have a (deserved) massive impact here. In particular, because I think Saturday Night Synthesis is the most appreciated part of the blog, I've devised a new weekly series, which, hopefully, will serve as a thank you for KinasePro too.
Don't expect me to discuss patent literature: I can't do this and, moreover, I'd never be that good. It'll be different but not too much...

Now, computing: maybe you already know everything about my plucky computer and how proud I am every time I manage to open three programmes at the same time, even though my OS is XP and this should already be impossible with 64 MB of RAM.
Well, now, I've managed to make it even faster replacing IE with more geekish Opera (ninth version). It eats less RAM and it's like having a lighter version of firefox. Lovely!

Mm, although someone recently told me Europeans should not be interested in American politics (but their government is so dramatically keen on exporting democracy everywhere, isn't it?), it looks like the Democrats won these midterm elections. Most of (American) scientists were hoping for this result: let's see what the Democracts will do for science. The ball is in their field now...

First of all, The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog has now a new, state-of-art, anti-spam, anti-trolls, anti-boring rubbish filter. You write your comment and I judge whether it'll be displayed or not. 
Will this prevent some people from annoying me? (I sincerely doubt it, but, at least, they won't annoy YOU any more).

Tomorrow, Frank S. Walsh, executive vice president of Wyeth Research, will visit our department of Pharmacology for a so-called "meeting with the students". Now, considering the organization of the said department/university, it's likely to be another bright example of how things must not be done. Bad omens surround the meeting: small room, odd scheduled time, lack of enthusiasm among the students, etc.
Now, you probably expect me to present Frank Walsh: talking about his articles I read or, given that I'm still an undergraduate student, mentioning where some of his researches have been quoted during lectures. Thing is I've never read  one of his articles because we don't have access to journals and I've recently noticed none of my lecturers/professors has ever quoted a single article (except one, sadly now retired, org chem professor, two years ago). This is an embarrassing thing to confess, but, as you can understand, it's not entirely my fault.
So, to sum up, I'll go to the meeting, take some pictures and write a report here tomorrow. Tonight, I'll maybe consider another research on the internet, but the odds that I'll ask him something (intelligent) are poor.
Should I ask him about this year's Nobel prize in Chemistry? (It doesn't sound like an intelligent question, does it? And, moreover, I am the last person who should say anything about this issue, considering what I'm going to do after the graduation).

Again on Walsh's visit. I'm wondering who is going to be there. Most of the students I know said something like: Who cares? I can't speak English! Why should I waste my time?
I guess most of the people there will be lecturers, professors, PhD students and other human beings working at the department, who, I hope, have read or know something that may deserve a question.
Am I wrong? And is this, at least, the only way who organized the whole thing has to avoid a long silence following a generally welcome phrase such as "who wants to ask Mr. Walsh a question"?

According to my prevision, there won't be any seat left by the time I'll be able to reach the place (I've lectures just until the very beginning of the debate...).
Will this make leave the few plucky students like me who SHOULD be the centre of the meeting quite soon? (I think so, especially if it's sunny).

You'll know the answers tomorrow.