Words about science and hiking
Staph aureus excels at evading the human immune system, and its innocuous-seeming color is just one more of its tricks. The characteristic golden color was noted when it was first isolated from infected surgical wounds in 1881[1] From Microbiology in Pictures The pigment is a carotenoid, a cousin to the anti-oxidant vitamin A found in carrots Read More …
The short answer is that diagnostics are low-risk low-reward and therapeutics are high-risk high-reward. These risk terms are relative – in either field, most startups fail. The cost of bringing a diagnostic device to market is $25–50M. Novel or highly instrumented technologies are on the high side of that range. The cost of bringing a Read More …
It’s not often you see a movie that is both information-dense and highly entertaining. “The Game Changers“, which I saw last night at the Boulder International Film Festival, scores highly on both counts. I hadn’t heard of the movie. Its opening montage – which features Ultimate Fighting, powerlifters, biochemical diagrams and rhinoceroses – provides few Read More …
Well, yes. But the thing that a startup must focus on is not science. It’s raising money so that you can do science. Having a PhD is not necessarily an impediment to raising money, but neither is it particularly helpful. In fact, you don’t even need a bachelor’s degree to raise huge sums of money, Read More …
Tuberculosis bacilli grow slowly, and grow inside human cells[1] . Slow growth tends to make bacteria intrinsically less susceptible to antibiotics, and being inside a host cell makes it more difficult to achieve a high, therapeutically-effective dose of an antibiotic. To add to the challenge, resistance to some of the most effective anti-TB antibiotics (like rifampin) Read More …
I’ve avoided writing up the last day of my hike. It was a fine and lovely and uneventful walk. I retrieved my last water stash, followed a gully up and through the Diablo Range and down again and back to the Arch Canyon trailhead. Pleasant and uneventful, but also deserving of a reckoning. It was Read More …
The first thing you need is a story. The story has many chapters – about technology, about your team, about clinical utility, about intellectual property, about risks – but it has to have a certain ending. That ending is one in which investors make a 10X return on their investment. At least. Few early-stage investors Read More …
Published on Apple News “True” is far too strong a word. But the estimate is neither ridiculous nor a troll, despite the use of such an inflammatory comparator. The argument is simple – a cited RAND study estimates the disincentivization to pharma R&D of drug price regulation would cost the average North American or European of ages 55–65 about Read More …
Medicines from engineered bacteria offer promise — and pitfalls
This work[1] blows away previous efforts. The word “breakthrough” is used far too often to describe results that are incremental, or that are promising but not well-supported. CancerSEEK is a genuine breakthrough. The gold standard for cancer diagnosis is the biopsy – a bit of suspect tissue is excised and studied, and determined to be benign Read More …