Blake R Peterson

Fly high, metal grandpa.

In vivo CAR T cell generation to treat cancer and autoimmune disease Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies have transformed treatment of B cell malignancies. However, their broader application is limited by complex manufacturing processes and the necessity f...

I have no other way to say it. This paper blows my f@&!ing mind:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is a cumulative maximum intensity projection movie of the endoplasmic reticulum labeled with the membrane marker mEmerald-Sec61B.

The 2026 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List

The 2026 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List has 4 tenure-track positions: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... #facultychemjobs #chemsky #chemjobs

We set out to quantify U.S. academic contributions to medicines. The results stunned even us From 2020 to 2024, universities contributed patents underpinning 50% of FDA-approved drugs. 87% of those academic breakthroughs came from American institutions.

“universities contributed patents underpinning 50% of FDA-approved drugs…

NIH-funded basic science has contributed to the development of more than 90% of new medicines, vaccines, and devices…

75% of scientists in America were considering leaving the country.”

www.statnews.com/2025/06/06/u...

I’m a chemist and chemical biologist. pharmacy.osu.edu/directory/bl...

God, it's brutal out here

In a new Science study, cryo–electron tomography captures the in-cell architecture of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, illuminating how the coordinated action of molecular machines drives life’s fundamental energy conversion.

Learn more in this week's issue: scim.ag/3FA3Ygq

graph of NIH basisfor new drugs

A pie graph worth keeping in mind as the NIH budget plummets jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... for 356 new FDA drugs approved

Pfizer, Arvinas post mixed breast cancer survival results in first phase 3 test for a PROTAC degrader Pfizer and Arvinas’ estrogen receptor (ER) degrader has

Summary: 1st Ph3 readout for a #PROTAC; likely path-to-approval in metastatic breast cancer patients w/ ESR1 mutations after having received endocrine therapy & CDK4/6 inhibitors; in line with previous clinical data; stock brokers don‘t understand Ph1/2 data. www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/pfiz...

There’s a frequent perception among recent entrants to drug discovery world that if we could just find drug candidates faster, this will be a useful accelerant to the overall process. The issue is: this thinking is mostly (but not entirely) incorrect. 🧵 1/

As an undergraduate.

Hello Justin! I worked with Dave from 1987 to 1990.

Members of the Peterson lab and the Drug Discovery Shared Resource High Throughput Screening lab at The Ohio State University celebrating the holidays in December 2024.

Happy Holidays from the Peterson lab and the OSUCCC Drug Discovery Shared Resource HTS lab at Ohio State!
@osucccjames.bsky.social

Celebrating Xiaojun Hu's successful defense of his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences (Medicinal Chemistry specialization)

Super proud of Xiaojun Hu for a successful defense of his PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry (Medicinal Chemistry specialization)! Xiaojun was the first Ohio State graduate student to join my group after I moved here in 2019.

How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States? To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States. The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then. However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone. What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population? The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout. This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third. This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990. This comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.

Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990

Coffee and its waste repel gravid Aedes albopictus females and inhibit the development of their embryos - Parasites & Vectors Background Dengue is a prevalent arboviral disease and the development of insecticide resistance among its vectors impedes endeavors to control it. Coffee is drunk by millions of people daily worldwid...

Caffeine is also an effective insecticide.

doi.org/10.1186/s130...

I feel your pain, Jordan, but that thread was really funny. It reminds me of a trip almost 20 years ago when my daughters were one and four, and our four-year-old threw up all over my wife on an airplane.

Fluorescent Tags Are Basically Never Silent

Fluorescently labeled proteins are essential to research. But we should never forget how messed-up their behavior can be. An example from condensates:

Inside your body, aging unfolds at remarkably different rates New research shows aging is not a uniform process. Parts of our bodies start aging earlier than others, right down to our organs and cells.

“Scientists..found that those who often smoked, drank or ate processed meats were prone to accelerated organ aging, while anyone who regularly exercised or ate oily fish was far more likely to have youthful organs.” www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/202...

Sky Follower Bridge - Chrome Web Store Instantly find and follow the same users from your Twitter follows on Bluesky.

If you have a PC or Mac, with a Chrome browser, use Sky Follower Bridge to find the followers that you had on Twitter over here.

It’s very easy to use !

chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-f...

Post showing precipitous decline of share of deaths in Massachusetts from diseases for which vaccines are now available, from 70% in 1840 to low digits % by 1950-60 where it is stayed. Caption: There are not many places on earth where we have detailed cause-of-death data from before the era of widespread vaccination. Massachusetts is one of those places. From 1842-1877, 70% of all deaths were from diseases which we today have vaccines to prevent.

Anyone who is anti-vax is pro-death. Period. The science and data do not lie. And they don’t care about your podcast.

Thanks, Darci for being such a wonderful host. I had a great time at UC Irvine visiting with your faculty and graduate students in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Chemistry.

Cartoon of man on plane with hand raised, saying “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”

In grad school in the early 90s, I made the poor decision to try to use a crescent wrench to remove the cap from a 50 mL bottle of BBr3 in a fume hood. I spilled the bottle in the process and had to evacuate the lab as it filled with white vapors of HBr when the hood couldn’t clear it fast enough.

Types of MedChem papers
#ChemSky

a close up of a hamster 's face and paws ALT: a close up of a hamster 's face and paws

Skeetorial time! We need to chat about pharmacokinetics & pubs. If you plan to publish in vivo PD/efficacy studies, the minimum credible accompanying PK package is an IV leg + an IP/PO leg if that's your eventual route. In the same species, preferably at the planned efficacy dose. 1/