Words about science and hiking
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 …
Innovations created in developed economies do not deprive less-developed economies of anything. More to the point, less-developed economies eventually get access to these innovations, and get them at prices that are cheaper than the prevailing prices in developed economies. Drugs are a good example of this dynamic. Many of us consider new drug prices to Read More …
Phage therapy isn’t ever going to be the cure-all envisioned by overly-enthusiastic science writers. But it doesn’t have to be. Curing some patients of some indications is a noble and worthy goal in and of itself. And maybe when we learn to use phage therapy in limited applications, we can start thinking about tackling sepsis Read More …
Let’s step back a bit on this question. We care about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance because they impact our ability to avoid suffering and death due to bacterial infections. Antibiotics are just a means to an end. Antibiotic resistance blocks one path to that end, but it is just one path; there are others. I’ll Read More …
At a high level, we would become more like other English-speaking countries that have universal healthcare and higher taxes (ie., all of them): the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Except we would have more guns and violence. In other words, not much would change in terms of national character. But there are a few specific Read More …
Well, sort of. Netflix is TV, right? It’s a piece about phage therapy, part of a docuseries from Buzzfeed called “Follow This”. It’s in Part 3, the “Superbug Snipers” episode (not the Sexbots episode, sorry). I have about 10s of a Skype conversation explaining why the economics of developing anti-bacterials mean that phage therapy will 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 …
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 …
It is a generally accepted precept that corporations are obligated to maximize shareholder returns. Resources thus should be directed only to efforts that have the highest expected return. Diseases of poverty, like TB and malaria, by definition afflict those least able to pay, and thus are least likely to generate satisfactory returns on investment for pharmas. Read More …
After decades of stagnation, I believe we are witnessing a renaissance of antibiotic discovery research. There are two principal factors driving a resurgence in antibiotic discovery today: availability of public funding, and application of rational design and systems biology approaches. For several decades now, antibiotics have been (and remain) a medium-risk/low-reward proposition for drug developers. Read More …