16
Feb
2021
Genentech’s New AMD Contender, Takeda’s Win Against CMV, and the IPOs Continue
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11
Feb
2021
Long COVID’s Insidious Toll, Novo’s Victory Against Obesity, & Gilead’s Stumble in IPF
Our culture tells us to fear death. Every day, we hear updates on the COVID-19 death toll. Deaths are broken down by age, race, ethnicity. By state and nationality. The US numbers – 473,000 and increasing by more than 3,000 a day – are tragic and numbing. But while we fixate on death, we are devoting scant attention to the... Read More
11
Feb
2021
Backed by 5AM, Ensoma Gets $70m to Make More Accessible Cell Therapies
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10
Feb
2021
No Longer an Afterthought: Day One Raises $130M for Childhood Cancer Therapies
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8
Feb
2021
A Single Shot for Heart Disease: Sekar Kathiresan on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Sek Kathiresan. Sek is the co-founder and CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Verve Therapeutics. Verve is using genome editing technology in a bold fashion. Its idea is to develop a one-and-done shot that essentially would prevent cardiovascular disease in adults. Its plan is to start out with a group of patients at very high... Read More
8
Feb
2021
An IPO Bonanza, FDA Clears BMS CAR-T, and AVROBIO Gene Therapy Dazzles
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7
Feb
2021
The Variants Ratchet Up the Pressure
The biggest questions at this moment in the pandemic concern emerging variants. Over the past two weeks in preprint publications, we have learned: Viral antigen tests remain effective in their ability to detect cases of COVID-19 driven by new variants. New objective comparisons of viral antigen tests: Clinitest; RAY Crispr; Panbio. Good news: Israel is the first real-world example of... Read More
5
Feb
2021
Scientists Love Data – And Data Reveal Most People Prefer Anecdotes
The unreasonable effectiveness of personal narrative – and what it means for persuasion and health The goal of “alternative facts,” is “to flood the zone with sh*t,” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon notoriously explained to the author Michael Lewis. The idea is to persuade us it’s just too difficult to know what to believe about anything. This “manufactured nihilism,”... Read More
4
Feb
2021
The Insurrectionist and the Visionary
One photograph captured our contradictions on Jan. 6. There was the man carrying the Confederate flag where it had never flown before – inside the US Capitol. A violent mob, carrying symbols like that and worse, sought to assassinate elected officials and overthrow our democracy. They were sent there by other elected leaders who were telling lies. It was horrific.... Read More
1
Feb
2021
2021: The Rise of the Variants
This column will have a “glass half full / glass half empty” feeling for many readers, I fear. Before diving deep into the troubling emergence of highly transmissible and virulent SARS-CoV-2 variants, a couple of brief reminders: Immunology is very complicated: for the uninitiated, please read this (always impeccably well written) piece by Ed Yong in The Atlantic. We still... Read More
31
Jan
2021
The Evolving Virus Against the Vaccines
For about a month, we were lulled into thinking we had turned the corner and were winning the battle against the virus. With 95% effectiveness in preventing COVID-19 illness and nearly 100% efficacy in preventing severe disease, we just needed to mass produce these wonderful mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna. Then we could bring an end... Read More
28
Jan
2021
Ideas for an FDA Reboot
The FDA needs to get healthy, and fast. Its credibility as the world’s No. 1 science-based regulator of food and drugs has been tarnished. From the start, it had to play catch-up on RT-PCR diagnostic tests in the wake of CDC’s epic screwup. Partly to make up lost ground, it swung open the floodgates for antibody tests. A Wild West... Read More
27
Jan
2021
Ukko Gets Bayer’s Backing for an AI Approach to Food Allergies
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24
Jan
2021
What’s Your DEQ? Why Data Empathy Is Essential For Health Data Impact
“Their story — yours, mine — it’s what we all carry with us on this trip that we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.” — Dr. William Carlos Williams to Dr. Robert Coles, from Coles’s “The Call of Stories.” The term “data empathy” is on the verge of entering the... Read More
21
Jan
2021
A Bold Idea for the NIH
Too many people don’t believe anymore in the American dream. But if you can’t dream big, you can’t accomplish big things. Today, I’d like to propose a bold idea for the future of biomedical research. Let’s triple the National Institutes of Health budget over the next decade. Impossible? Hear me out. We know the NIH, with a $41.7 billion a... Read More
19
Jan
2021
Gene Editing for Transplants and Cell Therapy: Luhan Yang on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Luhan Yang. Luhan is the founder and CEO of Hangzhou, China-based Qihan Biotech. Qihan is using genome editing technology to engineer pigs with organs that can be safely transplanted into humans. This is what scientists call xenotransplantation. The concept has been around a long time, but new CRISPR-based gene editing technologies make it... Read More
19
Jan
2021
A Vision for an mHealth-Driven Biopharma Future
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17
Jan
2021
Two Doses or One? Let’s Stick To the Data
With COVID-19 surging and a chaotic political situation, we still have reasons to consider ourselves fortunate. We have two safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. While the rollout has been frustratingly slow thus far, these vaccines and others under study hold our best promise of pandemic control. Both products, the... Read More
14
Jan
2021
Our Communities, and Biotech, Need Local Journalism
National traumas force us out of our comfort zones. They can force us to search, to ask new questions, to think deeper about our world. This week, my first real journalism job came to mind. One day, when I expressed surprise to my editor in Madison, Wisconsin that the tiny Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota had won the Pulitzer... Read More
14
Jan
2021
How Worried Should We Be About Emerging Strains of SARS-CoV-2?
All virus strains mutate continuously. That’s normal. There’s nothing inherently concerning about that word, “mutation.” Unless, of course, the mutations give an evolving virus new properties that make it more transmissible or more pathogenic. That’s trouble. The news has been worrisome in recent weeks with reports on the B.1.1.7 strain first detected in the UK, and other new strains of... Read More