Tag Archives: clinical trials

It’s time for biopharma to embrace public health

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This piece first appeared in the Timmerman Report.

Some years ago when I was working for a large biopharma, I heard a story. It seems a senior scientific executive had visited and given a seminar in which he described the company’s portfolio of drugs for type 2 diabetes. The company was projecting great uptake and profits. A member of our site raised his hand and said, “But if people just ate less and exercised a little more, they could prevent type 2 diabetes and the market would disappear.”

The answer: “Yeah, but they won’t.”

Harsh! But that executive was right. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) recently published a paper in JAMA describing how much different health conditions contribute to private and public health spending in the US. Number one? Diabetes. Following that were heart disease and chronic pain. These are chronic lifestyle diseases with big environmental and behavioral components, and the data make me wonder if there’s an opportunity here for the industry to zig and do some things that, in the long run, may make drug development more sustainable.

I think it’s time for biopharma to get involved in public health. Continue reading →

Baseball, regression to the mean, and avoiding potential clinical trial biases

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This post originally appeared on The Timmerman Report. You should check out the TR.

It’s baseball season. Which means it’s fantasy baseball season. Which means I have to keep reminding myself that, even though it’s already been a month and a half, that’s still a pretty short time in the long rhythm of the season and every performance has to be viewed with skepticism. Ryan Zimmerman sporting a 0.293 On Base Percentage (OBP)? He’s not likely to end up there. On the other hand, Jake Odorizzi with an Earned Run Average (ERA) less than 2.10? He’s good, but not that good. I try to avoid making trades in the first few months (although with several players on my team on the Disabled List, I may have to break my own rule) because I know that in small samples, big fluctuations in statistical performance in the end  are not really telling us much about actual player talent.

One of the big lessons I’ve learned from following baseball and the revolution in sports analytics is that one of the most powerful forces in player performance is regression to the mean. This is the tendency for most outliers, over the course of repeated measurements, to move toward the mean of both individual and population-wide performance levels. There’s nothing magical, just simple statistical truth.

And as I lift my head up from ESPN sports and look around, I’ve started to wonder if regression to the mean might be affecting another interest of mine, and not for the better. I wonder if a lack of understanding of regression to the mean might be a problem in our search for ways to reach better health.
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