health

How Valeant had a bright idea but took it too far

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How Valeant had a bright idea but took it too far

There are three types of Valeant criticisms that often get lumped together:

  1. It attacked the traditional approach that corporate R&D was the only thing that mattered in pharmaceuticals, which upset a lot of entrenched stakeholders
  2. It did some things that were morally questionable but perfectly legal (e.g., price optimization, inversions)
  3. It did some things that were morally questionable and legally gray (e.g., the specialty pharmacy incident)

This article does a great job of pointing out that the outrage over #2 and #3 mask the success that Valeant had with #1. There’s no reason to believe that corporate R&D is inherently better for the world than biotechs, and you could certainly see a smart, talented scientist preferring the fast-paced startup culture of a biotech based in Boston to a large corporate based in New Jersey.

Doctors can now successfully 3D print a knee joint

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Doctors can now successfully 3D print a knee joint

While this footage isn’t as exciting as I’d like it to be – I’d really prefer a big old gross close-up of a splayed knee joint – what it represents is pretty wonderful. Essentially, doctors at the Columbia University Medical Center have been able to print a knee meniscus using a degradable plastic scaffold and a protein growth system. The body then subsumes the printed object and turns the protein into a knee joint.

The last all-nighter

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The last all-nighter

It did not take long for my daily late nights at the office to segue into a voracious need for letting loose off the clock. I quickly became unable to socialize without popping the medication that now provided just enough extra energy required to maintain my outgoing side. Even on nights when I planned to take it easy, the meds had no off switch, so I’d find myself leaving the office full of energy that I didn’t know how to quell. The mix of whiskey rocks and a pocket of pills was a potent one. I was now getting high seven nights a week, every night a delicate balancing act.

Self-destructing cancer drug

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Self-destructing cancer drug

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.