Core Nation Rants

I would like to engage you in a little theater of the mind. Let us imagine that an anonymous donor has bequeathed $10 billion for research into 1 of 3 therapeutic areas. Moreover, this donor orders that the entire grant goes to the disease state that receives the most votes from a nationwide Internet poll. The 3 candidate illnesses are: Obesity Addiction Lung cancer Without ever conducting this poll, I am reasonably certain that the results would be overwhelmingly ...

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Author: Ken Kramer, PhD

When I hear public uproar over the price of prescription drugs, my initial urge is to defend the pharmaceutical companies. The average R&D cost for a new molecular entity (NME) to get from bench to bedside is over $800 million* (cue the Dr. Evil music). It does not help that the FDA charges almost $2 million just to submit a new drug application (NDA) for review. Drug discovery is a pricey business and ...

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Author: Ken Kramer, PhD

Imagine that you woke up one morning, turned on your local news and heard the following uttered from the newsreader: “a cure for cancer has been found.” Quickly, you turn up the volume only to hear that the news gets even better. This cure works on all known cancers and only requires that the patient take a single pill, just once. Sounds pretty simple: take your medicine and you regain control of your life. However, no ...

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Author: Ken Kramer, PhD