11
Mar
2025
NIH Cuts Hit Young Scientists the Hardest
[Editor’s note: David Baker gave this speech to Seattle community leaders Mar. 10, at a celebration of his 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.] Let me just briefly tell you how innovation arises in biomedicine and where drug discoveries come from. A large percentage of the innovation is made at universities by graduate students and postdocs. Often, they take their ideas... Read More
9
Mar
2025
Scientists Standing Up in Seattle
Several thousand scientists gathered Friday in Seattle for one of the nationwide “Stand Up for Science” protests. People studying a range of disciplines — biology, climate change, public health and more — took a break from the lab to protest cuts to federal spending on science and mass firings. Morale had been low for weeks among many attendees, but Friday... Read More
6
Mar
2025
Biotech Legend Retires, Jazz Buys Glioma Drug, & FDA Shakeup
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5
Mar
2025
Sluggish Corporate AI Adoption Has Motivated Entrepreneurs To Pick Their Spots
As economic historian Carlota Perez has described, there is typically a significant time lag between when the promise of novel technology begins to emerge and the productive deployment of this technology at scale; TR readers will recall the discussion here from June 2023. Today, we are seeing this with generative AI, an emerging technology that everyone is still trying to... Read More
4
Mar
2025
Flashback: Q&A on Founding TR
[Dear Readers: This Q&A from the Knight Science Journalism at MIT blog on Feb. 3, 2015 captures my thoughts on founding TR and where biotech was going. Thank you for your support. — Luke ] By Wade Roush For writers, part of the fuss about the Web explosion of the late 1990s was that it was finally possible to cut... Read More
3
Mar
2025
A Woman in the TechBio Arena: Najat Khan on The Long Run
Najat Khan is today’s guest on The Long Run. She is the chief R&D and chief commercial officer of Salt Lake City-based Recursion. The company is one of the first-generation companies that have sought to reinvent drug R&D from the ground up with automated technologies that collect a lot of biological data and then analyze that data with AI algorithms.... Read More
27
Feb
2025
Bluebird Fire Sale, Regeneron’s Gene Therapy for Deafness, & Eikon Raises a Bundle
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27
Feb
2025
How Maze Therapeutics Navigated Genetics-Based Drug Discovery
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26
Feb
2025
How to Know when a Company Should Throw in the Towel
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24
Feb
2025
Rewiring, Not Retiring: Health and Innovation for the Vanguard Generation
Most of my columns tend to focus on the importance and difficulty of applying emerging technologies to biopharma R&D, aiming to accelerate the delivery of impactful medicines to patients. Yet, as long-time readers know, I have an enduring interest in how to sustain health and ward off illness, a discipline that’s sometimes called Preventive Medicine, Preemptive Health, or, the term... Read More
24
Feb
2025
Defend Young Scientists
Biotech thrives on the creative dynamism of young scientists. Always has. Young scientists are under pressure. NIH grants are on hold. If the NIH budget is gutted, and a generation is forced to find other ways to earn a living, then the biotech industry will lose. It might not be clear for the next couple of quarters or next couple... Read More
18
Feb
2025
Defend the FDA
We need a competent, well-supported, tough and independent food and drug regulator in this country. We need that independent cop on the beat so we can have confidence that the medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and devices at the core of modern healthcare have passed the scrutiny of an uncorrupted, scientifically grounded and ethical group of people working in the public interest.... Read More
17
Feb
2025
Zero-Toll Medicine: How Individuals Can Use Crypto and AI to Fix US Health Insurance
The U.S. health insurance system is stupid, immoral, and infuriating. It is time to get rid of it altogether and replace it with an intelligent, modern, and efficient infrastructure befitting the American people and the 21st century. Incrementalism is not the answer. Solutions that add further fragmentation and complexity (including Medicare Advantage, Accountable Care Organizations, delegated managed care, and integrated... Read More
13
Feb
2025
RFK Jr. in Power, NIH and FDA on the Chopping Block, & Interest Rates Loom Large
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13
Feb
2025
Defend 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, the National Institutes of Health — biomedical science itself — is under attack. It needs us to stand up in its defense. The NIH is an engine of the American Dream. The NIH, with a $47.7 billion a... Read More
11
Feb
2025
Building a Fully Integrated Biopharma For the Muscle: Robert Blum on The Long Run
Robert Blum is today’s guest on The Long Run. Robert is the CEO of South San Francisco-based Cytokinetics. He joined the company back in the beginning in 1998 and became CEO in 2007. This company, and Robert’s career, are emblematic of what this show is about — The Long Run that it takes to develop new medicines. The company has... Read More
10
Feb
2025
Rethinking Risk-Benefit in Sickle Cell Disease Therapy
Pfizer’s decision last fall to withdraw voxelotor (Oxbryta) from the worldwide market is an example of how companies make risk-benefit calculations about medicines, and how those decisions vary widely from one category to another. Cancer drugs have their own set of standards. The risk-benefit calculus routinely accommodates uncertainty and severe side effects, if the medicine offers a modest and temporary... Read More
6
Feb
2025
Billion Cells Project, Alumis Merges, BMS Cuts Deeper
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4
Feb
2025
DeepSeek Shocked Silicon Valley, but It’s Not Earth Shaking for Biotech
DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence (AI) research group owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, dominated last week’s news cycle—at least for 24-48 hours. The group launched R1, the latest in a series of cutting-edge large language models (LLMs). Investors panicked, erasing over $1 trillion of U.S. equity market cap in a single day. Nvidia (NVDA), the maker of high-powered AI chips,... Read More
2
Feb
2025
Timmerman Report Turns 10
Timmerman Report is 10 years old today. On Feb. 2, 2015, I rode my bike to the office on a wet Seattle morning and turned on the lights. I thought there was a need for clear, probing, contextual — and fiercely independent — biotech journalism. The past 10 years of biotech have been remarkable. I’ve had a front-row seat. It’s... Read More