17
Feb
2020
As Scientists, It’s Our Duty to Speak Up as the 2020 Election Nears
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13
Feb
2020
Lilly, Genentech Alzheimer’s Drugs Fail, Revolution’s Big IPO, & an Obesity Drug Disappears
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12
Feb
2020
Automation and Miniaturization Are Upon Us: Gritstone’s Mission to Make Personalized Medicines
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11
Feb
2020
The Cell Therapy Puzzle: Jane Grogan on The Long Run
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6
Feb
2020
Sanofi’s Intriguing MS Drug, Merck’s Big Spinoff & Coronavirus Fog
Lots of shiny blinking objects are out there to pay attention to, but this was a week when a lot of fundamental hard work got done in biotech. Read about it in Frontpoints. Deal of the Week Merck is spinning off women’s health, biosimilars, and “trusted legacy brands” into a new company. The unnamed NewCo rolls together products expected to... Read More
6
Feb
2020
CAR-T for Autoimmunity: Bluestone Joins Sonoma Biotherapeutics, a $40M Bet
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5
Feb
2020
First Buy, Then Invest: Novartis, Gilead Join $35M Bet on Vineti’s Software
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30
Jan
2020
Coronavirus Fear Spreads, CVS Feels the Heat & Black Diamond’s Sizzling IPO
Last week, I was dismissive of the coronavirus outbreak stories. The internet was teeming with what struck me as alarmism. I’m still not running for the hills. I’m still rolling my eyes at the speed and volume of misinformation about coronavirus on the web. But more facts have since emerged to make this a more urgent and serious situation. We... Read More
27
Jan
2020
Scientists at the Movies: Relay Therapeutics CEO Sanjiv Patel on The Long Run
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26
Jan
2020
Challenging Core Assumptions, Tech Backlash Paves The Way for More Thoughtful HealthTech
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
23
Jan
2020
Incrementalism is the new Disruption, Trust is the New Black, and Positive Change (for now) at FDA: Takeaways from the 2020 Precision Medicine World Conference
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
23
Jan
2020
Much Ado About Coronavirus and 23andMe Hits the Wall
This was a quiet week in biopharma. Review it in your weekly Frontpoints. This Week in Alarmism Every year, we hear about an infectious disease scare that generates massive coverage, way out of proportion with the actual threat posed. Remember Mad Cow disease, SARS, Bird flu, Ebola, etc. etc? I’ve been in newsrooms providing saturation coverage of such things, and... Read More
22
Jan
2020
False Heroes: Pharmacy Benefit Managers and the Patients They Prey On
[Editor’s Note: this is an excerpt from “The Great American Drug Deal.” The book is now available on Amazon.] By Peter Kolchinsky It’s hard to know when actual prices for a particular drug really do go up, because there is so little transparency in pricing. A lot of the public discourse on pricing is based on “list prices,” which no... Read More
21
Jan
2020
Seeking to Understand Dr. King’s Vision of Unity, at Our Divided Moment
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16
Jan
2020
Understanding The Ideology Of Digital Transformation
The phrase resounding in corporations these days is “digital transformation.” What does that really mean? According to proponents, digital transformation reflects the assertion that in order to remain competitive in the modern era, organizations need to radically rethink their approach to how they collect, manage, and analyze information. Change is clearly afoot, but the ideology informing this hasn’t been entirely... Read More
16
Jan
2020
Lilly’s Half-Measure on Insulin, Illumina’s Up-Market Play, & the Little Deals from SF
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15
Jan
2020
Atomwise and EQRx: Two Contrasting Strategies for the R&D Inefficiency Problem
Pharma innovation expert Bernard Munos captures the inherent inefficiency of drug development with two fascinating statistics he recently shared with me. First, for large pharmas, the average cost of developing a new drug (simply based on the total R&D costs divided by the total number of new drugs approved for sale) works out to about $5B per drug. It’s an... Read More
13
Jan
2020
A New Cholesterol-Lowering Drug at a Low Price: Tim Mayleben on The Long Run
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12
Jan
2020
EQRx Taps Zeitgeist, Raises $200m For Innovative Drugs at Aggressive Low Prices
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10
Jan
2020
Entering JPM20 With a Grounded, Yet Hopeful, View of Health Tech
Health tech seems balanced precariously between excessive optimism and excessive skepticism, between the promise that emerging technology is poised to disrupt health like it has so many other areas, and the painful recognition that many idealistic technologists misunderstood both the scientific and human dimensions of the inordinately complex problems to be solved in both health care services and the development... Read More