Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and when I reflect on AIDS, I generally do it with a sense of amazement about how far we have come in the treatment of HIV since AIDS first came to the attention of the U.S. medical establishment, in form of a cluster of pneumocystis pneumonia infections in young men, in 1981. An AIDS-free generation is no longer a pipe dream. With all the progress that’s being made, though, I’ve been struck how one thing that seems to keep receding into the distance – like a manifestation of the joke that the future is...

I was on the phone last week with Rick Andrews, president and CEO of Thrasos, about acute kidney injury (AKI), and how it’s no longer called “acute renal failure,” the latter phrase having been scrapped in recent years. Cynics might claim it’s something the drug companies invented, so they can pump more chemicals into people earlier. But the idea, Andrews said, is to express that kidney trouble appears along a continuum, and pre-shutdown symptoms need to be handled promptly, because they create big woes on their own. Woes that might be lucratively attacked by the likes of Thrasos, with its...

I was on the phone last week with Rick Andrews, president and CEO of Thrasos, about acute kidney injury (AKI), and how it’s no longer called “acute renal failure,” the latter phrase having been scrapped in recent years. Cynics might claim it’s something the drug companies invented, so they can pump more chemicals into people earlier. But the idea, Andrews said, is to express that kidney trouble appears along a continuum, and pre-shutdown symptoms need to be handled promptly, because they create big woes on their own. Woes that might be lucratively attacked by the likes of Thrasos, with its...

Kudos to the folks at Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) for selecting the industry’s “hot button” issues for panel discussions at the annual BIO Investor Forum (BIF) just concluded in San Francisco. In years past it has been my experience that any panel, no matter what the topic, that ran alongside sessions reserved for company presentations during investor-focused events, was thinly attended at best. In those heady days of biotech, not that long ago, the rush was on to learn about the latest innovation from companies. Dollars were readily available for investment and biotech execs gave their presentations to a full...

Last autumn, I was searching for a way to get rid of the nerve-zapping pain that hit every time the barometer made a steep jump. My face full of post-plane crash titanium and regenerated bone acted like a weather station. I couldn’t find doctors with experience in my kind of injury. “Folks with injuries like yours are usually dead . . .” My husband turned to the military world, with the recent flood of soldiers with faces and other body parts that need rebuilding. He found a team at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas reporting on repairing maxillofacial trauma...

It is that time of year again when we take the pulse of the industry at the close of the third quarter. Overall we find that it is performing well, more so for public biotechs than private ones. Despite the continuing turbulence in the global capital markets investors have had no qualms about backing the biotech sector. The average increase in the stock values of the 231 public biotech companies tracked by the BioWorld Stock Report is up 38 percent year-to-date. The third quarter was particularly hot for biotechs with their collective stock values soaring by an average of over...

I always love reading about the IgNobel Prizes. The stated goal of the prize is to reward research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.” And this year’s crop of winners once again succeeds at those tasks. Take the 2012 Neuroscience IgNobel. It went to a team of scientists “for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere.” The winning study illustrated that using modern measurement methods, which can collect massive amounts of data, without updating statistical methods accordingly will almost inevitably lead to false positives. In their...

Viruses are on the border between living and dead. So are the theories about what some of them cause. Two studies were published last week that showed no link between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and either chronic fatigue syndrome or prostate cancer. The scientific journals consider the matter settled with these studies. In theirs new sections, Nature and PLoS ONE wrote about “the nail in XMRV’s coffin” and “The Final Chapter on XMRV and Prostate Cancer.” Umm . . . good luck with that. Actually, the link between XMRV and prostate cancer may be laid to rest fairly...

Biotechnology is an idiosyncratic industry in which some executives can stake their careers on the pursuit of orphan drugs that, at best, will offer only limited opportunity for corporate profits and investors returns, while addressing the usually unmet needs of a narrow patient base. Other biotech execs pin their aspirations to the old-school home-run approach of developing a blockbuster drug to address a prevalent indication such as diabetes, and then basking for the next decade in the blockbuster revenue it generates. Either way, success in biotech is a conceded longshot. And success is usually considered to be more of a...

With science boldly taking us where we’ve never gone before, we’re exploring new worlds and stretching the boundaries of our universe. While these are exciting times for the adventurer in us, they can be discomfiting for our inner ethicist. From cloning to stem cell research to genetic testing to patent eligibility to drug pricing to compassionate use to quality-of-life issues, we face a growing number of decisions fraught with moral and ethical questions that cannot be easily answered in a lab or by a textbook. What once were merely philosophical debates about the future promise of science have become gut-wrenching...