I watched the Indianapolis 500 this Memorial Day weekend and noticed something interesting. The fastest car completed 4 qualifying laps around the 2.5-mile oval with an average speed of 227 mph. However, the average speed of the winning car was a meager 162 mph. That is a big difference when you consider the conditions were, to the passive observer, similar. But a closer look reveals the underlying realities. During qualifying, there is only one car ...
Eli Lilly announced on August 18 that it was ending its large clinical trials of the drug semagacestat in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Semagacestat is a drug that inhibits the activity of the enzyme gamma secretase. Gamma secretase catalyzes the processing of beta amyloid, a protein that slowly accumulates in the brains of patients with AD. The beta amyloid hypothesis of AD has been a guiding force in the search ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
