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4
May
2025

Tech-Enabled Power To The People: Ingratiating Chatbots and a Virtuous Food App

For at least a decade, nearly every tech company has promoted their product as facilitating the “democratization” of something – perhaps “data driven medicine,” or “genetic information” or “access to clinical trials” or “digital health” (all real examples).  Like “mission-driven,” “results-oriented,” and “disruptive,” the term “democratization” has become so overused by the tech community that it’s now more of an...
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3
May
2025

Our Collective Hope For AI in Health, Plus Explanatory Models and an Epic Podcast

A recent piece by Nathan Price captures our collective hope for AI in health with unusual clarity, even as there remains impassioned disagreement regarding how close these ambitions are to meaningful realization. For context, Price is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and CSO of Thorne, a company best...
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2
May
2025

A Sublime Experience: Views of Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research

Kathmandu, Nepal We did it together. The Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation completed a splendid expedition to Everest Base Camp on Apr. 23, 2025. This trip succeeded on every count. All 17 members of the team made it to the mountaineering camp at 17,600 feet / 5,364 meters. We exceeded our $700,000 fundraising goal for high-risk /...
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22
Apr
2025

Embracing Non-Linear Career Paths: Professor Martin Gaynor

(Guest) Editor Note: Martin Gaynor, the Lester A. Hamburg University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, was recently honored with the Victor R. Fuchs Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Health Economics by the American Society of Health Economists.  His response (shared with his permission) was both striking and magnificent, emphasizing the contingency of...
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14
Apr
2025

Can You Improve Your Health Without Obsessing About It?

Can you improve your health without obsessing about it? I’ve been, well, obsessing about this question as I continue to spend more time and mindshare in the world of healthy aging evangelists, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs, longevity champions keen to guide you, and often test you, towards their conceptions of healthier aging.  (See this piece on the longevity boom, and this...
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11
Apr
2025

Why I Left European Science

Monday was my last day as a group leader at The Francis Crick Institute. I got my job at the Crick in 2020, almost exactly 5 years ago, right as COVID was beginning. I had finished my PhD in 2019, and had always told myself that I would only ever be an academic if I could find a place where...
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9
Apr
2025

What US Biotech Can Do to Meet the Moment

We have entered a new era in biotech.   Turmoil at the FDA has introduced new uncertainty. NIH funding cuts and grant delays have led to academic institutions to hold off on job offers to young scientists. The Trump Administration’s reset of trade relations with the world caused a financial market meltdown, and wild rebound. All of these things are...
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8
Apr
2025

We Need an mRNA Champion in a Red Cape

I grew up in an era of Superman comic books. Superman captivated the imagination of a generation of kids like me. It told stories of an otherwise ordinary human who could achieve extraordinary feats of speed and strength, leaping tall buildings with a single bound, to defeat the bad guys. Miracles could happen on a foundation of truth and justice,...
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7
Apr
2025

Leaving A Mark On Patients

Leading a nonprofit that helps kids and families with terrible diseases requires a certain ability to roll with the punches. That feeling hit last week when I heard about Peter Marks’ forced resignation as Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Here was a scientific champion of innovative cell and gene therapies at the FDA. He...
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31
Mar
2025

Relationships That Make TechBio Go ‘Round: David Roblin on The Long Run

David Roblin is today’s guest on The Long Run podcast. David is the CEO of London-based Relation Therapeutics. The company uses multi-omic tools to look for drug targets in human tissue samples. It seeks to find the relationships between perturbed biological states and disease, with the help of machine learning. Relation emphasizes relationships in another sense as well – the...
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29
Mar
2025

GLP-1s Secret Weapon: Improving Health By Enhancing Agency

The arrival of generative AI prompted many to worry about the adverse impact on human agency; after all, if the technology can effectively do what we’re doing, where does that leave us?  This concern was the central focus of Reid Hoffman’s “Superagency,” which I reviewed for the WSJ earlier this year – see here.  Essentially, Hoffman argues that new technologies...
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28
Mar
2025

Longevity Is Having A Moment

Dying, with few exceptions, has never been especially popular, and our shared interest in not dying hardly constitutes breaking news.  Nevertheless, the aspiration of living longer — and remaining healthier while doing it — appears to be all the rage. Consider these recent headlines: “Why is longevity sudden so hot?” – Chrissy Farr, Second Opinion. “The longevity business is booming...
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27
Mar
2025

A Moment of Peril and Promise

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