Interesting story of Scios' CEO and p38 program

I think in the news biz they'd call this a human interest story: Scios' then-CEO's battle with multiple myeloma inspired the company to try their p38 inhibitor in multiple myeloma.

Unfortunately, following the article, Scios' compound ran into tox issues, so it never made it to market (particuarly for it's first application, RA), but at least it appears that the CEO is still alive and kicking - a quick GOOG search shows news articles about him in 2006, so presumably he's very healthy.

Way cool kinase target popularity charts

The Kinase Research Portal has a cool application (linked in the header to this post) that shows kinase publication history and allows you to see target-specific publication trend graphs. Here's an example showing p38 publication trends (with a surprisingly steep upward trajectory.)

ARRY's p38

Courtesy of KinasePro, the link above points to a ~60 slide presentation revealing the development of ARRY's p38 inhibitors (as well as some history of previous p38 inhibitors by VRTX, BI, and Roche.)

Array Pharma advances p38 lead to clinic

Array just completed an IND for ARRY-797, and expects to launch safety trials as a precursor to RA application trials.