Category Archives: Disruptive technologies

Biopharma should choose targets using a baseball-style draft

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

I was sitting around last evening checking out how the end of my fantasy baseball season is working out (for the record, first out of ten in one league and fourth in the league I wrote about here) and I starting thinking again about the parallels between baseball and drug development (which I previously wrote about here and here for example, and also Stewart Lyman has a nice piece on a similar theme here). And it hit me that there’s another way in which biopharma could take a  page from baseball: fantasy and Major League Baseball both.

Biopharma could institute a draft for drug targets.  And to explore this I’m going to employ the time-honored, not to mention trite and artificial, format of a series of questions and answers.

Continue reading →

The “good,” the “difficult” and the “reality”: patients in the digital age

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

With apologies to Sergio Leone.  And to you, for making you read that really bad pun.  Just move along.

In an engaging and thought-provoking perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Louise Aronson described her experience in getting treatment for her father, who was suffering from low blood pressure and other health issues.  Her father was admitted to the hospital and went through examinations and fluctuations in his health during his stay.  He seemed to stabilize but then his blood pressure dropped again and Dr. Aronson asked for someone to come and check on him.  The staff was polite but non-committal and she decided to perform an exam on him herself to check if he had internal bleeding.  He did, she obtained evidence, and her father received rapid care to prevent further blood loss. 

She relayed this story in the context of how health care providers often bin patients and their support networks into “good” and “difficult” categories, based on how much and how often those patients acquiesce rather than challenge or even seek information about ongoing treatments.  As she describes it, the staff “were polite, but their unspoken message was that they were working hard, my father wasn’t their only patient, and they had appropriately prioritized their tasks. ” Her message was that the medical profession needs a cultural shift,in which patients and their families whom are more actively engaged in their care are seen as an asset, not a detriment to medical practice.  She also suggested some practical elements that would help this, including tracking more clearly when patient engagement occurs and rewarding it through changes in billing codes and practices. Continue reading →

Gaming to help beat cancer

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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

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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 →

Enter citizen science

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

h/t to @engagedethics for the heads up.

What do you think of when you think of citizen science?  Maybe dads buying Geek Dad and helping their kids build Lego robots that can manipulate a lego binary clock.  Maybe people tracking their health, thoughts, bodies, or other things in a really granular way in an effort to get at their quantified self.  Maybe hobbyists building and flying drones to sample atmospheric particle levels or track neighborhood traffic patterns.  Maybe patients groups banding together and funding research into cures, like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation did with Kalydeco.  Maybe birdwatchers helping researchers track the migration patterns and populations of North American birds.  Maybe it’s something else, something you know about or have heard about or are planning to do right now.  Choose any or all of the above and you’re completely right.

Because citizen science, like a lot of movements these days, isn’t something legislated or codified or directed from on high. It’s something organic and crowd-based and bottom up, and it’s going on everywhere.

This is the world that’s being enabled by technology.  Whether it’s 3D printing, DIY Bio, computer modeling, personal monitoring or other kinds of tools, the barriers to experimentation are falling rapidly, and interest in figuring stuff out is on the rise.

The Citizens Science Association has been working on ways to support this new way of doing science.  They’ve been convening groups to look at topics like Governance, Conferences, ways to publish, and ways to communicate via other means.  There will be a webinar on September 17th to report on progress and it sounds like a worthwhile thing to listen to.  I haven’t been involved in the Association, but I’m planning to listen in.  Because technology keeps lowering the barriers to entry, and I’m really excited to see what comes out.