Tag Archives: evolution

Sequencing in polio, baseball pitching and cancer: sometimes the order of events matters

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This piece originally appeared in the Timmerman Report.

What do the polio virus, baseball pitch choice and cancer have in common?

The answer, of course, is sequencing. But not in the “figure out the DNA” way (although that’s involved). Instead in the “what comes first” way. Confused? Read on!

A big perk of Seattle is proximity to great institutions of biomedical research like the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Ever since my graduate student days in genetics at UC-Berkeley I’ve enjoyed going to seminars–especially seminars that are outside my field of study. Very little beats a good seminar for giving you a quick, condensed view of the state of a field of research. A bad seminar…well…we all could use more sleep, right?

In early October, Raul Andino of UCSF came to the Hutch to talk about his work on viral evolution. His team has been examining a clever real-world system to track the evolution of viruses. The near-eradication of polio (one of the great public heath victories of the past century) has led to the curious problem that as of the middle of this year most new cases of polio arose as a result of vaccination efforts. The live, attenuated vaccine that’s used in the developing world can, in very rare cases, mutate in just the wrong ways in its host, leading to the creation of a virulent strain that can infect others. In the US we use an inactivated polio vaccine which requires several injections; in much of the developing world the oral polio virus is preferred due to its ease of administration, lower cost, and immunization profile. The Andino lab realized that by studying these isolated outbreaks, which all originated with the same, genetically identical progenitor, they could test a hypothesis about the adaptive landscape of virulence evolution. Continue reading →

Some MLK Day thoughts about evolution, teachable moments, and being human

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Maybe my favorite episode of Northern Exposure is the one where Maurice Minnifield (played by the great Barry Corbin), the bigoted, pompous, ex-astronaut is surprised to discover he has a son, Duk Won, conceived during service time in Korea. After grudgingly admitting that Duk Won’s claim is real, Maurice has a conversation with Chris, the town’s DJ and amateur philosopher, about how difficult this is. Their conversation concludes something like this:

Maurice: I wouldn’t have had such a problem with this if only…

Chris: If only he were white?

Maurice: …Yeah…

Chris: Well, that’s a reason for hope.

Maurice: What? What are you talking about?

Chris: Because racism is a learned behavior. And that means it can be unlearned. Continue reading →

The power law relationship in drug development

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

A few weeks ago a friend and I had the great opportunity to go see Nate Silver speak at the University of Washington. He’s a funny, engaging speaker, and for someone like me who makes his living generating and analyzing data, Silver’s work in sports, politics and other fields has been inspirational.  Much of his talk covered elements of his book, The Signal and the Noise, which I read over a year ago. It was good to get a refresher. One of the elements that particularly struck me this time around, to the point that I took a picture of his slide, was the concept of the power law and its empirical relationship to so many of the phenomena we deal with in life.

Nate Silver graph small

Figure 1: Slide from Nate Silver’s talk demonstrating the power law relationship in business–how often the last 20% of accuracy (or quality or sales or…) comes from the last 80% of effort.

Because I spend way too much time thinking about the business of drug development, I started thinking of how this concept applies to our industry and specifically the problem the industry is facing with creating innovative medicines.

Continue reading →