By

David Shaywitz

17
Feb
2024

New Medical Podcast (Like Winter and the 2024 Red Sox) Offers Bleak Outlook, While Four Books Instill Hope

As Bostonians tentatively emerge from the bleak cold of another New England winter and begin to search for signs of spring, we instinctively turn to the Red Sox.  Unfortunately, I am informed by my daughters that the team’s prospects appear dismal this season, so we’ll need to look elsewhere for hope. We might consider instead Boston’s other great preoccupation: biomedical...
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9
Feb
2024

Botox: A Luminous Example of Field Discovery

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I review Death To Beauty, a new book by Dr. Eugene Helveston. It’s about the fascinating history of botulinum toxin and the California ophthalmologist, Alan Scott, who drove it into clinical use. The book review, of course, speaks for itself, but I wanted to highlight for TR readers an aspect of the story that...
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21
Dec
2023

The Cultures of Large and Small Pharmas, plus: Can They Overcome The “Productivity Paradox” and Seize the AI Moment?

Spurred by several questions I’ve received from students and trainees, today’s year-end column examines some of the ways large biopharma companies are fundamentally different from small biotech companies and startups.  We’ll also ask whether biopharma can overcome new technology’s dreaded “productivity paradox” and learn, quickly, how to apply AI to accelerate drug development. Large Pharmas vs Smaller Companies (Including Startups)...
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19
Nov
2023

Industry Insights: Five Key Figures From The Atlas Annual Review

I’ve always been captivated by and drawn to the intersection of raw emerging science, ambitious determined talent, aggressive capital, and savvy strategy that come together in an often-combustible mix to generate novel therapeutics.  At the earliest stage, it’s critical to figure out what you’re going to aim at (the molecular target) and what type of therapeutic you’re going to use...
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8
Nov
2023

Architects and Gardeners, a Captivating Developmental Biology Book, & an Inspiring Immigrant Story

Architects and Gardeners Most leadership offsites I’ve attended have included some flavor of personality assessment – not so much to formally classify us, but rather to make the point that different people have different styles, and to emphasize that you can’t assume everyone you work with approaches the world the same way you do.  In this spirit, I wanted to...
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6
Nov
2023

Think Clinical Trials Are Working OK? Ask a Cancer Patient

I can’t stop thinking about a recent series of poignant blog posts, written by an emergency room physician affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. Her husband has been battling a terrible cancer – recurrent/metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.  Given what she does for a living, the author, Dr. Bess Stillman, is about as well-positioned to be a savvy patient...
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11
Sep
2023

Sterile Information: Early Forecasting Not The Answer To R&D Productivity Woes

Two recent Wall Street Journal deep-dives nicely bookend a critical, and unresolved, tension faced by large pharmaceutical companies: how can their R&D organizations discover, develop, and deliver the new medicines patients await, and the growth and return on investment that shareholders demand? Early this year, I discussed an April 2023 profile of Lilly by journalist Peter Loftus, who described how the company, led by a physician-scientist...
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31
Jul
2023

Lessons For Biopharma from a Healthcare AI Pioneer

As drug developers consider how to leverage AI and other emerging digital and data technologies, they look to related businesses, such as healthcare systems, for lessons and learning.    We would be hard-pressed to find a better guide to AI in healthcare than Ziad Obermeyer, an emergency room physician and health science researcher at the University of California-Berkeley. His research...
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17
Jun
2023

Learning From History How to Think About the Technology of the Moment

Generative AI, the transformative technology of the moment, exploded onto the scene with the arrival in late 2022 of chatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot developed by the company OpenAI.  After only five days, a million users had tried the app; after two months: 100 million, the fastest growth ever seen for a consumer application. TikTok, the previous record holder, took nine...
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4
Jun
2023

Pharma R&D Execs Offer Extravagant Expectations for AI But Few Proof Points

As the excitement around generative AI sweeps across the globe, biopharma R&D groups (like most everyone else) are actively trying to figure out how to leverage this powerful but nascent technology effectively, and in a responsible fashion. In separate conversations, two prominent pharma R&D executives recently sat down with savvy healthtech VCs to discuss how generative AI specifically, and emerging...
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21
May
2023

Big, If True: Opportunities and Obstacles Facing AI (Plus: Summer Reading)

Today, we’ll begin with a consideration of the promise for AI some experts see in healthcare and biopharma. Next, we’ll look at some of the obstacles – some technical, some organizational – and re-visit the eternal “data parasite” debate. Finally, we’ll conclude with a few suggestions for summer reading. The AI Opportunity: Elevating Healthcare for All Earlier this month, I...
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15
May
2023

Biopharma Innovation – Beyond The Breathless Headlines

Biopharma relies on innovation to stay in business. Success depends on our collective ability to discover, develop, and deliver new products that cure or meaningfully mitigate disease over and over again. Patents allow for innovators to be rewarded, for a while. When patents expire, allowing us to purchase powerful generic medications like atorvastatin for pennies, manufacturers must come up with...
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8
Apr
2023

Tech, Pharma, and the Uneven Distribution of the AI-Enabled Future

The worlds of technology and entrepreneurship are captivated by recent advances in generative AI and large language models (LLMs).  The arrival of ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI (a startup partnered with Microsoft), caused Google to declare a “Code Red,” akin to “pulling the fire alarm,” the New York Times explained. The latest class of startups at Y Combinator are reportedly flocking...
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2
Apr
2023

New Book Contemplates How Generative AI Will Serve Man

In 1935, Astounding Science — the premier science fiction magazine of the day, and perhaps ever — published “Proxima Centauri.” It was a short story envisioning an encounter between a voyaging earth spacecraft and a ship from a nearby star system. Written by Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins), the tale features the original use of the phrase “first contact” in...
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23
Mar
2023

Welcome to the AI Irruption

Biopharma, like the rest of the world, appears to be on the threshold of profound, technology-induced change. Incredible advances in artificial intelligence, manifested most recently in GPT-4, are here.  This technology, Ezra Klein explains in the New York Times, “changes everything.”  Bill Gates describes it as “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface,” and declares, “the...
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26
Feb
2023

The Success of Your Tech Deployment Depends On A Role You’ve Probably Never Heard Of 

The success or failure of many technology platforms — including in particular health tech platforms — rests with a largely obscure role of outsized importance: the “solutions engineer.”  The role itself goes by many names. Back when I was at DNAnexus in the mid-2010s, this role was called “Solutions Scientist.” Others call it “Forward-Deployed Engineer” or “Embedded Analyst.” Whatever the...
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4
Feb
2023

Grand Défi Ou Goulot D’étranglement Ultime: A French Pharma Tackles Data Science

Most biopharma companies have started down the path of digital transformation – a fundamental overhaul of everything they do for the digital age. It’s not clear yet that anyone has arrived at the desired destination. Even so, there have been some early wins, generally related to operations, as the CEOs of both Novartis and Lilly have described. Arguably, the most...
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30
Jan
2023

Generative AI: No Humbug

In 1845, dentist Horace Wells stood before Harvard medical students and faculty, eager to demonstrate the utility of nitrous oxide – laughing gas – as a general anesthetic.  Wells tried it out on a patient who needed  a tooth extraction. The dose, it turned out, wasn’t enough. The patient screamed in agony.  As described by Paul Offit in You Bet...
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4
Dec
2022

Hot Topics in Biopharma: Initial Impact of Digital, Data Dilemmas in Clinical Studies, and the Search for ‘New Normal’

For today: topics relevant to many drug developers (and others): The initial impact of digital The dilemma of data collection in early clinical studies The elusive search for “new normal” ways of working Initial impact of digital in biopharma The sexy promise of digital/data/AI in biopharma was that emerging digital technologies were going to solve our most important and vexing...
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