Words about science and hiking
I promised that rather than just bitching about crappy phage therapy papers I would offer some thoughts about applications where PT could be successful and have an impact. None of my suggestions will have the drama of PT swooping in to rescue a dying patient for whom doctors had given up all hope. But they Read More …
I’m going to take a break from writing about terrible phage therapy papers. Frankly, they are all very much alike, as the same errors get repeated over and over. It’s depressing for me to write these posts and I suspect it is getting to be a bit boring for you to read them. So let’s Read More …
Not much to say about this that I didn’t say in a previous post. Once again, researchers are claiming to advance the field of phage therapy by using mice as animate test tubes: mice are injected with pathogenic bacteria, followed shortly (or concomitantly) with a dose of phage. The phage kill the bacteria, the mice Read More …
A new and exhaustive genome-wide association study for colorectal cancer has been published. This work is likely to be the definitive atlas of gene variants contributing to CRC risk: whole genomes were sequenced for 1400 cancer cases and compared to 720 controls. The results were mixed in with previous studies to improve statistical powering – Read More …
One can sum up the 100-year history of phage therapy concisely: works great in the lab, fails in the clinic. Not a single Phase 2 or 3 clinical trial has yet shown phage therapy to be effective. This failure is not due to a lack of research effort. Search for “phage therapy” in PubMed and Read More …
I tend to be skeptical of claims that AI is going to lead to big breakthroughs in medicine. Drug discovery is the usual arena for such claims, the notion being that algorithms will pick over drug datasets to open a pipeline of new therapeutics. I’m pretty confident that AI plays will not revolutionize drug discovery. Read More …
Jon Otter tweeted out this graph today, and it just blows me away: “Trust apportioned” is apparently the term in UK English for what we in the US call hospitals. So the dotted lines are hospitals and the solid lines include community cases. Huge drops in C diff diarrhea and MRSA BSIs. This is the English Read More …
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 …
Scientists show high levels of hostility aggression, and conscientiousness compared to the general population, at least according to psychologists. As a scientist and a manager of scientists, I agree but would add another trait: fear of failure. Science is supposedly distinguished from other forms of knowledge by falsifiability: if a statement cannot be disproven it Read More …
I’m always glad whenever I see a microbiology theme breach the moat of the NYT and make it on to their opinion page. But I usually end up disappointed once I actually read it. That’s the case with this call to biobank the world’s human gut microbiome. It’s far from the worst idea published this Read More …