David Shaywitz

AstraZeneca has emerged with a reputation as one of the industry’s most imaginative pharmas – it was named the “most innovative” global pharma company by IDEA Pharma in November 2019, and was cast as Gallant to GSK’s Goofus in a recent Financial Times piece examining their contrasting trajectories. In this context, I was especially excited when I saw what looked... Read More

Most biopharma companies can talk at some length about embracing data science, and sometimes it’s hard to get beneath the surface of what they’re doing, at least publicly. But it was my privilege recently to frame and moderate a very insightful recent conversation – recorded for on-demand viewing at this year’s virtual BIO 2020 conference. This provided an unusual opportunity... Read More

An abiding challenge at the intersection of technology and pharma R&D is the need to bring together two historically disparate cultures.  Tech companies tend to be led by engineers. Pharma R&D is generally run by chemists and biologists in the early stages, and by physicians further on in development. Each of these domains has its own distinct language, culture and... Read More

If you were responsible for the health of a large population, and could access just one of the following types of data, what would you choose (assuming all were acquired legally and responsibly)? (a) Genetics and other –omics data; (b) EHR data; (c)  Consumer/adtech data. For at least the last 20 years, we’ve been obsessively focused on the first two... Read More

Come for the tech, stay for the culture.  That seems to be the hope of most digital champions inside large pharma companies. These executives hope to instill in their organizations not only important new capabilities, but also a “Silicon Valley” mindset, an innovative spirit characteristically associated with tech entrepreneurs. The reality, of course, is more complicated; pharma executives – and... Read More

The value of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in healthcare delivery was highlighted earlier this year with the publication in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) of a paper that rigorously evaluated a deeply appealing hypothesis: that you can improve care and reduce costs by focusing on “superutilizers” – the patients who consume the most healthcare resources.  I discussed this... Read More

Growing up in an academic household (my parents are both professors at Yale Medical School, still engaged, as ever, in dyslexia research), it was perhaps inevitable that, outside of my parents, my first role model was the brilliant President of Yale University, the late Bart Giamatti (you know- Paul’s dad).  The elder Giamatti inspired me so much as a teenager... Read More

One consequence of the present crisis is the urgent embrace of telemedicine, as I recently discussed. Whether the adoption is sustained beyond the crisis period remains to be determined, although use seemed to be increasing overall even before the pandemic hit.  As more physicians and patients find themselves pressed to adopt telemedicine, I thought it might be helpful to better... Read More

This week, I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal a pair of books about the increasing use of experimentation by businesses and other organizations: Experimentation Works, by Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke, and The Power of Experiments, by Michael Luca and Max Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School.  These books in some ways represent the sequel to one of... Read More

Technology companies are experiencing a staggering reversal of reputational (though not financial) fortune; their stature seems reduced with each successive news cycle.  Gone is the halo many tech companies once enjoyed. The implicit (and often explicit) assumption that tech innovation inevitably makes the world a better place has been replaced by real concerns that the picture may be far more... Read More

Digital transformation (as I recently discussed), and the implementation of emerging technologies more generally, is routinely pitched by enthusiasts like Tom Siebel as both urgent and inevitable, something organizations need to embrace or risk irrelevance, if not extinction.  Yet the “embrace or die” assertion is under increasing, and healthy, scrutiny, as the “techlash” (technology backlash) gains steam.  “Surveillance Capitalism”: Tech... Read More

I had the privilege of serving as emcee for the “Data Science and AI” track on the first day of this week’s Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC) in Santa Clara, CA, as well as chairing a panel discussion on data mining and visualization.  I came away with a sense of optimism and need, organized around several key themes. In Praise... Read More