Category Archives: Business

Gaming to help beat cancer

Posted on by

All opinions my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

Plants versus Zombies 2: It’s About Time just came out.  My son spent a significant fraction of his weekend playing it on my iPad.  Okay, fine, I did too.  It’s a lot of fun, it challenges (but not too much) and it teaches you facts like, uh, like that Egyptian society in the past had a real fascination with pyramids.

So it’s not the most educational of games.

Which is why I was stoked to see the writeup of Re-Mission 2 in FierceBiotechIT.  This game takes elements of cancer treatment and places them in the context of a game that both educates patients undergoing cancer treatment as well as provides them a way to feel more in control of their situation.  Version 2 also builds on the impact of the first Re-Mission game, which showed success in improving adherence of patients to their treatment regimens.  Adherence is an important element of medical treatment and trying to make sure people take their medicines is an ongoing problem as we try to improve the efficiency of our healthcare systems.

In addition to behavioral metrics being changed by Re-Mission, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) also showed that playing the game activated brain areas associated with motivation–again, tying gameplay to elements of adherence.  Some brain region activations also correlated with subject described positive and improved attitudes towards chemotherapy after gameplay. Continue reading →

Internet access is a public (and private) health issue

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

If the Founding Fathers had lived today, they would surely have included internet access as one of our inalienable rights.  No, scratch that, because if they had lived today they would have used Google Docs to crowdsource the Declaration and the result would probably have been much more generic and middle of the road than it actually is.  Also, the Declaration would also have been limited it to about 500 words so readers wouldn’t get bored and surf somewhere else, and it would have had embedded GIFs. Preferably animated.

Still, the ability to access the internet and everything that comes with that is, if not a right, an incredible advantage.  So I was stunned when I read in the Seattle Times the other day that a significant fraction of people in the US–about twenty percent–have little to no internet connection, although those numbers have recently begun to creep up, presumably due to smartphone uptake.   But of course, being a good Seattlelite with a liberal bent, my next reaction was to say, well, let’s not rush to judgement or conclusions.  Maybe those people just don’t want the internet.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Except the article goes on to say that while seniors generally did not feel they were missing anything, the majority of other respondents did feel they were missing something important and were being left behind because of their limited access.  So it’s not a life decision; it’s a question of cost, access and education. Continue reading →

Batman, Blockbusters, and Biopharma

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

This blogging thing is interesting.  I’m discovering one of the challenges with blogging on a regular basis is the back and forth tidal pull between length/quality and speed/relevance.  There are measured, thought-out, lengthy pieces I’m working on about things and concepts I am interested in exploring.  But at the same time I find myself responding to current events that spark a thought and connection, an Aha! moment, with quick reaction pieces.  Finding that balance is tough, especially since I like both kinds of writing and think they add to the general blog environment that I’m trying to create.  And time is limited.  In a given week I shoot for maybe 3+ posts, in an effort not to get too burnt out or disenchanted in the way described by Chuq van Rospach.  Sometimes, though, a combination of thoughts, articles and other bits of information come together and I find myself staying up to pound out those 500 or 1000 words to capture an idea in the moment.  All for the benefit of the 3 or so people who will skim this post, plus the random butt-click registered by some poodle sitting on an iPad.

But whatever.

So, Batman. Continue reading →

Do Biopharma workers hate their jobs? Answer, I don’t think so, but…

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

A colleague of mine when I worked for Merck used to drop by my office to discuss project management, and one of his favorite terms was “engagement.”  I was reminded of this when the people at Gallup published their most recent results about their polling of the American workplace.  You can find their report here, and a writeup here.  One of the interesting/sad findings was that only 30% of their survey respondents (and there were 25 million respondents) report being engaged in their work.  This astounds me.

One of the many perks of science is that far more than 30% of the people I work with on a daily basis are very engaged in what they do.  By engaged, let me refer to the Gallup report:  “Gallup defines “engaged” employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.”  Sounds like a good working definition.  There are a number of reasons to go into science, but rarely do I find people saying they’re doing it for the money.   Probably because that just doesn’t compute when you say it out loud. Continue reading →

Lack of replication no surprise when we’re studying really complex problems

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

For another nice take on this topic see Paul Knoepfler’s blog post here.

One of the sacred (can I say sacred in reference to something scientific?) tenets of the scientific method is reproducibility.  If something is real and measurable, if it’s a fact of the material world, then the expectation is that the result should be reproducible by another experimenter using the same methods as described in the original report.  One of the most well known (among physicists anyway) examples of irreproducible data is the Valentine’s Day Magnetic Monopole detected by Blas Cabrera back in 1982.  Great experimental data.  Never repeated, and therefore viewed as insufficient proof for the existence of a magnetic monopole.

So it’s troubling that in the past few years there have been numerous stories about the lack of reproducibility for different scientific experiments.  In biomedical science the number of  reports on the difficulty of reproducing results has gotten so great that the NIH has begun thinking about how to confirm and require reproducibility of some kinds of experimental results.  Just a few days ago another field, that of psychological priming, saw the publication of an article that the effects of “high-performance priming,” could not be reproduced.  This is another field undergoing serious questioning about whether/why results don’t reproduce, with commentary from such luminaries as Daniel Kahneman. Continue reading →