Disqus - Friends of mndoci

Re: Ologeez. Is this the paper discussion site we were looking for?

Sciphu — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:56:44 -0000

I have been following your posting on different publishing alternatives (as well as yout other posts). This was a nice site, but for my uses it is kind of an overkill. I am trying out a blog-based publication model with a much simpler set-up. What I've found is that publishing in places like JustScience gives you a reasonable hit-rate from google searches, and I am thinking that maybe publishing through blog-posts could be a permanent alternative/addition to traditional publishing. Please come have a look at www.sciphu.com. If you or your readers can help me with ideas for development of the site I would be very thankful.

Re: How Does Breast Cancer and Other 23andMe Four Star-Rated Topics Relate to My DNA, Part 1

Sciphu — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:48:18 -0000

For those that would want to test for colorectal cancer: Laboratory alternatives/additions to colonoscopy are available and new ones are emerging. You can test for blood in feces, do DNA-tests (http://www.nordiag.no/) or ELISA tests (http://www.phical.com/). I am sure there are more alternatives out there as well. Colonoscopy is probably still the safest bet, but this will hopefully change soon.

Re: Ologeez. Is this the paper discussion site we were looking for?

Sciphu — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:39:10 -0000

Yes, it does. Until (if ever) this is a success however, Blogger is a time-effective solution for me. I am nevertheless grateful for any suggestions on other platforms, hosting alternatives, web-design solutions etc.

Re: FriendFeed takes a interesting step

Sciphu — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:36:10 -0000

Excellent initiative, I've signed up....:)

Re: Information underload

Sciphu — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:28:02 -0000

Deepak, your post reminds of Paul Nurse's Nature Horizons piece that I read not to long ago. A couple of quotes:

"...comprehensive understanding of many higher-level biological phenomena remains elusive............".

"One reason for this is that our past successes have led us to underestimate the complexity of living organisms. We need to focus more on how information is managed in living systems and how this brings about higher level biological phenomena. There should be a concerted programme to investigate this,....."

Re: Gene Sherpa Reports Systemic Medical Insurance Fraud

Sciphu — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:41:22 -0000

You sometimes add a new dimension to blog-ramblings Andrew :-)

Here's why you need a genetic counselor: http://tinyurl.com/4ccbo6
- and here's why you might not need one: http://tinyurl.com/4a9ytg

Re: All about aging (or not)

Sciphu — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:45:29 -0000

A quote from Ray Kurzweil (who hopes he will live for ever, - I'm not so sure...): "There is a valuable repository of information stored in our brains. Our memories and skills, although they may appear to be fleeting, do represent information, coded in vast patterns of neurotransmitter concentrations, inter-neural connections and other relevant neural details. This information is the most precious of all, which is one reason death is so tragic" - p. 329 second paragraph in "The singularity is near". One can disagree or agree with Kurzweil, but preserving information is arguably a good reason to try and avoid biological death as we know it today.

Re: Announcing The Navigenics and Think Gene Partnership!

Sciphu — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:04:35 -0000

I would love to have one of those. Beautiful post !!.

Re: Nils Reinton (SciPhu) relaunches site: BIOpinionated

Sciphu — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:15:55 -0000

Thank you sir :-D and ditto on your site and writings. Nils

Re: “Genetic Engineering” will not “save” population trends

Sciphu — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:01:09 -0000

"Face it, the trend in civilized nations is radical non-directed social stratification."

Is it ? I was under the impression that more and more people have access to education, - which means that more and more people have equal opportunities, which is what matters, - we moved away from "everyone created equal" some time ago didn't we ?

Re: “Genetic Engineering” will not “save” population trends

Sciphu — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:11:30 -0000

No, you probably wouldn't have the same life, but that IMO is not the same as not having equal opportunity, a tougher route maybe, but still opportunities are not actively blocked by authorities. I think what you are arguing is a lack of equal possibilities (in the lack of a better word) or maybe a lack of equal access, in which case I agree, equality is an (undesirable ?) utopia.

That said, in contrast to US, Europe (and especially my region) is approaching equal possibilities too.

Re: Declaration of Interest

Sciphu — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:37:53 -0000

Andrew. Congratulations on your new job :-D

Re: Chinks in the stem-cell monopoly

David Hamilton — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:08:03 -0000

Wikipedia, unfortunately, is a much better encyclopedia than it is a dictionary. I certainly didn't intend the word "chink" in any offensive sense, just in its common usage as a crack or a narrow opening. See here: http://dictionary.reference...

Re: Biotech financing: Are early-stage companies hot again?

David Hamilton — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 16:18:58 -0000

The biggest biotech VC clusters tend to be where the companies themselves are -- the SF Bay Area, Boston/Cambridge and San Diego, with some additional activity in New York. For some reason, I don't tend to hear a lot about biotech VCs in Seattle, suburban DC or the Research Triangle area, although that might just be happenstance.

Re: Andy Grove’s placebo pill for U.S. healthcare

David Hamilton — Sat, 05 May 2007 06:54:10 -0000

I certainly don't want anyone to think that I have a solution for the healthcare mess -- I'm groping my way around in the dark the same as everyone else. On the other hand, I've also never claimed to be as smart as Andy Grove.

Electronic health records are indeed a fine idea for many of the reasons SVLance suggests. I've never seen anything to suggest that Grove wants them legislated, though; my impression is that he's relying on moral suasion rather than calling for regulation, which is why I pointed out the barriers to voluntary adoption. Legislation would indeed be one way to clear those hurdles, and I'd be all for it. Although even universal EHR adoption isn't likely to touch the system's deeper problems, and a badly designed mandate could screw things up even worse in terms of costs and quality-of-care.

On insurance companies and their profits and administrative costs -- well, I agree that this is a major problem, particularly since the major "innovation" the private sector seems to bring to the table here involves finding new ways to "buckrake" by insuring the healthy while denying coverage to the ill (or those likely to become so). What exactly to do about it is less clear to me at this point, on both the theoretical and practical levels.

No arguments here than many people (myself included) should exercise more and eat less.

Re: Ringing in the healthcare-reform debate

David Hamilton — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:25:36 -0000

Thanks to Maggie and Alan for their comments. I do highly recommend Maggie's book, by the way -- it's an excellent and highly readable introduction to major problems in U.S. healthcare. I'll have other recommendations and perhaps even some mini-reviews as I get deeper into other tomes on the subject. I'll also have more to say on the future of insurance down the line.

Alan, you raise some good points about the potential pitfalls of centralizing healthcare decisions. On the other hand, the outcomes data I'm referring to -- particularly the research of Dartmouth's John Wennberg and Elliott Fisher -- strongly suggests that doctors and patients aren't doing a great job of selecting the most appropriate care either. (Maggie Mahar wrote about the Wennberg-Fisher work for Dartmouth Medicine earlier this year.)

One solution to the problem is “evidence-based medicine,” in which researchers rank the efficacy of procedures and drug treatments after subjecting them to rigorous controlled clinical trials. These sorts of studies can result in top-down guidelines issued from afar, but applying more analytical rigor to the question of which treatments work and which don’t surely can’t hurt. Of course, such evidence can also be used to drive reimbursement decisions, and that’s a stickier subject that I’ll happily punt on for the moment.

Re: Cleveland biotech Athersys raises $65M with reverse-merger

David Hamilton — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:37:14 -0000

This is a test comment. Here are test italics. Here's test bolding.

This is a test link to Google.

Re: Stealthy Oraya raises $4M for medical devices

David Hamilton — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:31:10 -0000

Many thanks for your comment and the additional information on Oraya and Michael Gertner.

Re: Applied Genetic Technologies gets $2M for gene therapy

David Hamilton — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:52:53 -0000

It is interesting, although of course the up-and-down history of gene therapy suggests that this sort of technology has to be viewed with a lot of caution.

I totally agree about the AGTC Web site -- it's obnoxious.

Genzyme appears to be increasingly interested in gene therapy. I missed an item from Friday in which they invested a fairly large sum in Ceregene, the Cell Genesys gene-therapy spinoff. I'll post a link here when I get the item up in a bit.

UPDATE: The Ceregene-Genzyme item is up here.

Re: Patients, CEOs and ideologues vs. evidence-based medicine

David Hamilton — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:38:23 -0000

Thanks for your comment, James. I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at when you refer to the "latest investigative efforts" or the "obviously botched" Dendreon approval; could you be a little more specific? As for stock shorting, I'm sure you know that it's a fact of life in biotech, where binary events like an approval decision draw shorts like flies whenever the outcome is in doubt. (Don't forget that the losses shorts can take are effectively unlimited -- it all depends on how much the stock bounces up when they're wrong.)

In general I tend to distrust conspiracy theories unless there's some solid evidence, and so far I've seen none regarding conflicts of interest where Scher or Hussain were concerned. (Purity is probably an unattainable standard, though.) Besides, the ultimate decision rested with the FDA; at the end of the day, advisory panel members are just that -- advisors.

Re: VB Life Sciences: Your chance to sound off

David Hamilton — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:17:32 -0000

Thanks for your comment. I've already been thinking about corralling some of the briefer funding news into roundups -- among other things, it's a lot more time-efficient on my side as well -- so that's something you may see more of going forward. Grouping them thematically is a pretty good idea, too, if we decide to go that way.

I am curious, though, whether having briefs up on the site in a timely fashion -- and often as not with at least a little analysis -- is at all useful to you and other readers. As someone whose roots are in daily journalism, I'm reluctant to step back from the news flow unless the briefs really aren't adding anything, or of course if they're actively taking away from the site's value.

As for the feed, I should clarify that I'm not talking about changing it over to title-only -- I hate those sorts of feeds, too. All I've done is to make some of the shorter funding-related newsbriefs "title-only" by forcing a jump right after the headline. Longer items (like this one) should still be running at length -- if they're not, that's something we need to look into. The idea is to spare casual readers from having to scroll past several boilerplate-ish briefs to get to something more interesting.

Re: Biotech venture funding takes a hit, but devices are hot

David Hamilton — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:51:08 -0000

Thanks for your comment. That's an intriguing thesis. I'll probably pose this question over on the Aegis Group blog, but I'm curious as to whether the tax code still favors debt over equity and whether that's also fueled the private-equity boom. I recall that issue getting a lot of attention during the LBO boom in the 1980s, although I don't know if the many tax-law changes since then have altered the equation at all.

Re: Patients, CEOs and ideologues vs. evidence-based medicine

David Hamilton — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:11:19 -0000

Tony F, thanks for your comment. On the threats and the existence of police reports, I have nothing to add, although I find it kind of hard to believe that the researchers and their institutions -- I think a Sloan-Kettering spokesperson was quoted in the first NYT piece on the threats -- would have made this all up out of whole cloth. Obviously, peoples' opinions on that subject will differ.

On the conflict of interest question for Scher, I don't know that I have a lot to add beyond what Ed Silverman put together here. I'm pretty sure you saw Ed's post, as it looks like you made much the same comment over there. I do agree that it looks fishy, and it's worrying that no one in a position to provide answers is is actually doing so at the moment.

Generally speaking, though, I'd make two points about conflicts. First is the simple one that academic medicine is so tightly intertwined with industry these days that barring anyone with commercial ties from sitting on advisory panels would depopulate the committess. I don't think that makes conflict waivers right, but whatever solution we find to the problem has to grapple with the fact that much of the academic medical profession has some ties to the pharma/biotech industry.

Second is a question back at you: What would actually constitute a conflict on the Provenge panel? People have raked Scher over the coals for his associations with Novacea and Sanofi-Aventis, but it's far from clear to me that the drugs those companies sell or are developing for prostate cancer would actually compete directly against Provenge in any case. Novacea, for instance, lists Provenge in its most recent 10-K as a drug that might be used in combination with Taxotere, which means it might also be used in combination with Asentar.

In other words, it's not entirely clear to me that these drugs are necessarily direct competitors to Provenge, since they're not active immunotherapies. To put the question another way, is Avastin a competitor to Provenge? The Genentech drug is in a phase III test against hormone-refractory prostate cancer, but it was also tested in combination with Provenge. Would an academic who consulted for Genentech be biased against Provenge in your eyes?

I don't bring this up because I have hard-and-fast answers to these questions, but I do think people often oversimplify the issues at stake, and that it's worth thinking the issues a little more carefully.

Re: Similar Biologics

David Hamilton — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:12:49 -0000

Of course, branded biologics aren't the "same" when produced in different facilities, either -- just ask Genzyme about its so-far unapproved Myozyme manufacturing line in Boston. Oddly, though, I haven't heard J&J or anyone else arguing that Genzyme needs to run clinical trials to ensure that the "new" Myozyme is the same as the "old" Myozyme -- instead, everyone seems content to let Genzyme tinker with the process until it passes a battery of simpler and less expensive assays and convinces the FDA that different batches of the protein are equivalent.

Why would it be a problem for would-be biogenerics makers to do exactly the same thing? Otherwise, I'm not sure why I'm not sure I see why different batches of Myozyme in this instance shouldn't also be tagged as "biosimilars," at least by the logic of this post.

Re: Similar Biologics

David Hamilton — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:12:49 -0000