Words about science and hiking
Liquid biopsy is all the rage now for cancer screening. But screening – testing apparently healthy people for a disease – is the Great White Whale of cancer diagnostics. I predict it will lose more venture capitalists more money over the next decade than every other Dx play combined. But that’s OK—redistributing money from wealthy Read More …
This one comes to us from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and is particularly heartbreaking: a 2-year old with congenital heart disease suffering a post-surgical Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pseudomonas infections are particularly liable to become resistant over the course of antibiotic treatment, and in this case treatment options were limited by allergic reactions to Read More …
The development of newer and better biosensing technologies will have almost no impact on health care. Why? Because detection of biomolecules is rarely the limiting factor in making a diagnosis or prognosis. What’s missing is not the ability to generate information, but the ability to interpret it. Most single biomarkers fall in the range of Read More …
Likelihood ratios are a good measure of the clinical value of a diagnostic test. Positive likelihood ratio = sensitivity/(1-specificity), where sensitivity is defined as the fraction of patients who have the disease and yield a positive test result, and specificity is the fraction of patients who do not have the disease and yield a negative Read More …
It is hard to imagine how this could happen. Let’s assume that all the technical obstacles that now plague gene therapy[1] are resolved. In other words, that we learn how to deliver genes efficiently to the appropriate tissues without any side effects. Gene therapy would still be appropriate for only a tiny fraction of human Read More …