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 Thursday, August 29, 2002
Assessing the Risk of Working in a Small Genomics Shop [GenomeWeb]
Coming from a company that went from a small startup to a large company, I have some things I want to say. Now, I am self-selected to appreciate reasonable risks. Sure, large companies have more resources but they also have more people wanting to use them. Often the focus is not a tight laser beam as it can be in a small company. When the entire company's future is based on the development of its small portfolio, you had better believe you can focus. Large companies have more resources but they are often not as efficient with them as a small company can be. Here is an example that many of us at Immunex saw over the years:
- Visit a large pharma to give a presentation
- Discuss the project we were presenting as well as skimming some of the other 4 projects we were working on.
- Find out that the pharma had 50 people working on the same 5 projects we had maybe 5 working on and we were still kicking their butts.
Now, maybe Immunex was an aberration but I believe that for an industry that needs highly creative and innovative people to function, large size just kills it, or rather slows it down so much as to be almost irrelevant. Many pharmas make their living doing the huge, large scale screening of chemical compounds or of genomic expression arrays that are difficult for smaller companies. But I believe that the leaps forward will continue to come from small companies or from parts of a large company that are allowed to act like a small one (often hard to do but there are examples). 11:49:43 PM 
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Listening to Lady in Black by Uriah Heep on my iPod while writing. This is one of those songs that I ALWAYS have to listen to. I mean really listen, not have in the background while I work. I hear this and I have to stop whatever I am doing and just listen. It is one of those songs I could play on repeat forever. I do not know why, out of the thousands of songs I like, there are a few that are stoppers. Lucky Man by ELP is another. So is The Queen and the Soldier by Suzanne Vega. All have a bittersweet voice. All deal with war and its effects on one man. I usually choke up when I hear them. Put the headphones on and sing along with them. Drives my wife nuts (plus I really like the way the woofers move in and out at the end of Lucky Man 11:35:18 PM
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OK. I am going to revisit NewsViews so that I only see the news in each category, not all of them at once. This way my blog posts will have a little more cohesiveness. 10:27:46 PM
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New Process Could Harness Hydrogen Fuel From Plants [Scientific American]
This could be huge. Essentially, they are using sunlight to create biomass. They then get out the sugars and get hydrogen out by their process. If this could be commercialized, it would mean that hydrogen for things like fuel cells could be generated using solar power rather than other energy sources (i.e. fossil fuel). This would allow us to use a much more environment friendly approach to energy production and move away from the huge problems (both environmentally and politically) of fossil fuel dependence. 4:43:01 PM
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Study Suggests Smallpox Vaccine Offers Long-Term Protection [Scientific American]
Evidence suggests that standard smallpox vaccine offers long-term immunity. Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found evidence indicating that the standard vaccine against smallpox confers long-term immunity. Their findings appear in The New England Journal of Medicine, Aug.29. [EurekAlert - Biology]
This fits with other data from real smallpox outbreaks. Immunity DOIES NOT wane after 10 years. This is one of those 'facts' that is really based on conjecture, not data (other recent examples are the '64 ounces of water a day' non-fact, and the 'transplants need lots of immunosuppressive drugs' non-fact). In a smallpox outbreak in England at the turn of the last century. The only people over 50 who died were those who had not been vaccinated. None who had been vaccinated did. Since in England at that time people were only vaccinated once in early childhood, this demonstrated that immunity could last 50 years. This paper shows at least 35. The 10 year idea simply came from a suggestion that vaccination every 10 years could not hurt and would probably help. Over time this became a dogma, with no one actually checking the original data. But, only recently have we developed the technology to accurately tell whether immunity was still retained. And it looks like it is retained for quite some time. Thus, we should target those under 27 or so in the US, since thses are the ones who have never been vaccinated. (As an aside, losing track of the originakl reported data will be more difficult as more information enters the digital realm. We can search old papers easier and find the relevant info faster, rather than relying on word of mouth for those 20 year old papers.) 4:36:48 PM
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Healthscape: Mysterious liver disease targets women. It strikes women 10 times more often than men. The disease has few symptoms until years after its onset, when the fatigue begins to set in. Even when the illness is fairly advanced, these patients may look like ``the picture of health,'' with a slightly bronzed pigmentation to their skin as if they had just returned from a magnificent vacation. But in fact, these patients are very ill with a mysterious, life-threatening disease called Primary Biliary Cirrhosis (PBC). [Health]
A tough disease. It affects mostly woman and it is very slow with intermittent symptoms. I would imagine that some doctors might have viewed it as 'in their minds'. We are finding out more and more times that it is not in their minds. There are some very unique diseases that affect woman much more than men. It is only in the last decade or so that people have recognized this. But women are still under represented in clinical trials. Not for malicious reasons but because the statistics are easier to resolve if the population in a clinical trial is uniform. Having minorities or woman add complexity to the trials and could increase the size needed in order to adequately answer the questions posed. Since this costs money, some trials only look at white males, or they used to. There is a real recognition that other groups have to be included because they will be taking the drugs, even if they had never been tested on their group. Same with children. Running a good clinical trial is very difficult. But it is the only way we can be sure. Damn placebo effect ;-) 4:08:21 PM
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Transplant patients from 40 years ago cause Pittsburgh doctors to take an about-face. In a radical departure from the standard way of treating transplant patients, doctors from the University of Pittsburgh have gone back to the future, so to speak, with the aim to get patients off all drugs. A similar strategy, without the deliberate attempt to wean, was in place 40 years ago. Seven of nine recipients of living-donor kidney transplants from that era have been off all anti-rejection drugs for up to 38 years. [EurekAlert - Biology]
This is great news. What is so human is that the protocol was shown to work 40 years ago. However, it was a small study done before we had a good idea of just how the immune system functioned. So, they made the comment that if one immune suppressant was good, several would be better. Subsequent work followed this path. We know so much more about tolerance and the immune system today. It is wonderful that someone revisted the original studies and has shown that it may be quite easy to keep a transplanted organ from being rejested, without needing a huge regimen of drugs. 3:55:41 PM
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