Words about science and hiking
I admit to doing a spit-take when I saw the title of this article: Aptamers as Therapeutic Agents: Has the Initial Euphoria Subsided?. At this stage in the game, with only one aptamer therapeutic cleared and it having perennially weak sales, that question mark in the title seems more than a bit out of date. Read More …
From Quora: “Excessive” is loaded term. Worse, it’s subjective and difficult to define. Let’s see if we can put it into some kind of context or framework that permits a useful discussion. Congress, always sensitive to public resentment over drug prices, had the GAO do a study on drug company profitability. The 1-page summary, which you should definitely Read More …
A truism among early-stage investors is that “you don’t invest in technologies, you invest in people”. The idea is that a smart, resourceful team will find a way to succeed, even if their technology crashes hard on the rocks of reality. Great leaders, the thinking goes, will always find a way forward. That’s not a Read More …
I read Bad Blood, John Carreyou’s account of the Theranos fiasco over Christmas and must say it changed my conception of what went down there. I’d written a fair amount about Theranos over at Quora (see here), and was clearly much too sanguine as to what was going on. I thought they were just at Read More …
Most news about the science and business of antibiotic development is bad. Major pharmas continue to drop their antibiotic R&D programs. Those that remain are not being rewarded: of the 16 antibiotics approved 2000-2017, only 5 had sales of more than $100M. That might seem like a lot of money to you or me, but Read More …
The federal RTT legislation, which you can read here, makes no reference to payments of any kind, except to state that a referring physician can not be compensated directly by the drug manufacturer. Indirect is just fine. I wonder if drug companies could possibly figure out ways to pay doctors indirectly? [1] Payments are not forbidden, Read More …
I’ve ragged on various phage groups for what I perceive as their shortcomings in moving phage therapy from proof of principle to an actual product that can be used to treat patients reliably. There are plenty of anecdotal reports and case studies of patients helped by PT, and I’m sure that many of them are Read More …
In its own uniquely perverse way, the stock market turns good news into bad once again. Gilead’s Hepatitis C drugs – Sovaldi and Harvoni – had the most successful drug launches ever. And with good reason – unlike the “breakthrough” cancer drugs you read about, these drugs actually cure a serious and widespread disease. Although Read More …
Business Insider: AI Startup Valued at $2B Probably. After all, most ventures fail. Tech investors, like bidders at an auction, are subject to the Winner’s Curse: those who err on the side of too much optimism are willing to pay more than those who calculate the risk/reward ratio correctly. They win the auction by overpaying. From Read More …
Of course they will. The more interesting question is whether they should. Or at least, whether it would be a loss to society if many did not. The assumption implied in this question is that high profits from US sales are needed to finance R&D to bring innovative, life-saving medicines to the rest of the world. But Read More …