Tag Archives: undervalued assets

The potential for “Found Research” in fecal transplant treatments

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

A few days ago the New York Times ran a nice article discussing a recent test of whether fecal transplants can be done using a pill format delivery system. The research, reported (and free, no less!) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was peformed by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital who had formulated human feces in an encapsulated pill format to see if that would be effective as a kind of fecal transplant. Fecal transplants  appear to overcome infections by Clostridium difficile in patients. However, the conventional method for providing a fecal transplant is to deliver a liquid slurry either nasopharyngeally or via an enema-like procedure, neither of which is easily scalable. Also, yuck.

The current work, in which 14 of 20 patients responded to initial treatments using the poop pills, and an additional 4 responded the second time around, provided a proof of concept that a frozen, pill format delivery system may be a workable alternative to the current standard.

But as I was reading this article, I was struck by another thought. Are we missing a great opportunity for research into the interplay between the microbiome and human physiology?

Continue reading →

Drug development and the NFL draft

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

The NFL draft is happening as I am writing this post. And of the many draft-related pieces I’ve read in the past few days, one from Vox.com particularly stood out. The article, by Joseph Stromberg, describes research by Cade Massey and Richard Thaler (here and here) about the skewed and irrational choices often made by teams during trades of draft picks. In essence, teams are likely to pursue a strategy in trading up that suggests they believe they have a much greater ability to forecast the future performance of a given player than is actually the case. Put another way, rather than following a strategy of diversified risk, teams commit to a specific player that they feel they need to get, rather than simply seeing who’s available when they are scheduled to pick and choosing the best player on their draft board.

Historical analysis shows that the difference between various players drafted at the same position is often negligible; on top of that teams who aggressively trade down and gather more picks in the lower rounds generally do better in terms of the value they receive for the money they spend in salaries. One might argue this is an artifact in part of the NFL Rookie salary structure, but even without that, players taken in later rounds will always command smaller salaries. Getting similar value for less money is generally a good thing.

If you’ve read posts from this blog before you know where I’m going. Drafting NFL rookies sounds a lot like developing drugs. Continue reading →

Undervalued assets in biopharma hiring: Adaptability

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

A night of fantasy baseball goes horribly awry

This season I had a spectacularly poor fantasy baseball auction draft.  It was my own fault.  For those of you unfamiliar with fantasy sports, a group of friends create teams by selecting players from a real sports league and track their performance over the season.  The better your players perform, the better you do in your league.  Many leagues, like ours, select players by means of an auction draft.  Everyone gets a certain amount of virtual money to bid on different players, and you use that finite amount of money to fill out your roster.

On the night of our draft, because I had made plans to go out, I set up the auction software with a bunch of default values for different players.  Basically, amounts that I was willing to bid up to for each.  This is called robo-drafting.   I thought I’d set my boundaries well.

I was wrong. Continue reading →