Words about science and hiking
By now you’ve no doubt read that cancer death rates (age-adjusted) are down 27% since 1991. The better sort of news articles point out that this is a bit of cherry-picking, as cancer death rates peaked in 1991, and current progress has brought us back to the rates that prevailed in the 1940s. This graph 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 …
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 …
@LizSzabo tweeted out this abstract from ASCO reporting that adverse events from Keytruda therapy were much higher than expected from clinical trial results. My retweet added a snarky remark about how pharma has gotten pretty good at picking its patients for trials and that this result should be no surprise at all. Let me expand Read More …
The prevailing narrative on drug prices, especially in the US, is that they are getting ridiculously expensive and unaffordable. That makes a story that’s easy to write – villainous drug companies vs desperate patients unable to afford life-saving medicine. But it’s almost completely wrong. Not the expensive part – the life-saving part. Most drugs – Read More …
On October 10th, President Trump issued a ringing denunciation (which he totally wrote himself) of socialism in general and socialized health care in particular: “Virtually everywhere it has been tried, socialism has brought suffering, misery and decay.” Socialism’s latest threat? To destroy socialized medicine for seniors in the US. If given the chance, socialists will “…give Read More …
In science – especially biology – what you find is often no more important than where you look. The oncogene paradigm of cancer genesis – that mutations to key genes cause cells to become cancerous – has reigned supreme for several decades now. It is a driving factor in the whole notion of personalized medicine, Read More …
Published on Forbes and Apple News There’s little question that we have been suckered into taking far more medicine than we actually require. But let’s face it – we want to be suckered. We ask for it, we demand it, and we get it. Pharma companies are enablers, but they are not all-powerful overlords forcing us to Read More …
The key question here is “advancing where?”. Where exactly do we want science to go and what do we want it to do when it gets there? Let’s look where R&D money is being spent. Willingness to pay seems like a pretty good indicator of our true – as opposed to stated – desires. The Read More …