MUST READS

An April 27, 2015 The Wall Street Journal article reported that MIT researchers “warned that the U.S. government was spending an ever-smaller percentage of its budget on basic research and development, fundamental exploration in a variety of fields that lays the groundwork for commercial products that may not emerge for years or decades, if ever.” According to the article, “The cutbacks might appear to be economical, but the report says they come at a high cost to both national prestige and long-term economic opportunity. “We are undercutting ourselves by not supporting basic science,” said Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who helped write the report…In their report, the MIT authors say basic research—the study of core scientific concepts that may or may not have commercial applications—has essentially vanished from corporate laboratories. Instead, such research is generated almost exclusively by federal projects. This is slowing progress in treatments for major diseases like Alzheimer’s, said Mr. Lo. “In the last decade we’ve had zero Alzheimer’s drugs approved by the [Food and Drug Administration],” he said. “And the reason is that we don’t understand the basic science of degenerative diseases.””

An April 27, 2015 The New York Times article reported on pricing concerns for precision and specialty drugs. According to the article, “He [President Obama] has asked Congress to let Medicare officials negotiate prices with drug manufacturers — a practice explicitly forbidden by current law. At the same time, the administration, through the National Institutes of Health, is off and running with its “precision medicine” initiative, meant to develop personalized therapies like those now on the market to treat illnesses like cancer and cystic fibrosis at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. Prices over $50,000 or $100,000 a year are not unusual…If the initiative is successful, scientists said, it could lead to new diagnostic tests and treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other illnesses. One-third of the money would be used to seek cancer treatments using genetic information. The excitement of scientists and patients’ advocates is tempered by the knowledge that personalized medicines already on the market are costly. Patients often pay much of the expense out of pocket.”

An April 27, 2015 The Denver Post opinion piece by Froma Harrop underscored Newt Gingrich’s call for the GOP to double NIH’s budget. According to Harrop, “Gingrich makes the case that federal support for medical research is a moral, as well as financial, issue. Good man, and guess he's not running for president this time around. But the financial piece of the argument is not insignificant. The biggest item in the federal budget is health care. Medicare and Medicaid alone cost taxpayers over $1 trillion a year. An investment in research could bring a high return in savings. Gingrich offers this example: Over the next four decades, the cost of caring for Alzheimer's patients is expected to jump 420 percent for Medicare and 330 percent for Medicaid. "Delaying the average onset of the disease by just five years," he writes, "would reduce the number of Americans with Alzheimer's in 2050 by 42 percent, and cut costs by a third." Note that these calculations don't assume a cure for Alzheimer's disease. That would be wonderful and could happen only if the dollars are spent on research. Today even a billionaire is fairly helpless against the ravages of Alzheimer’s…Still, there remain ideologues in Congress who would shrink the NIH in service of some simple-minded belief that government is bad. We should ask them to explain themselves.”

RESEARCH, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

An April 28, 2015 Boston Business Journal article reported that Biogen CEO George Scagnos “told attendees at the World Medical Innovation Forum in Boston on Monday that the Cambridge-based drug maker was likely to invest around $2.5 billion to pay for all of the trials and experimentation needed to finalize its Alzheimer’s therapy.” 

An April 27, 2015 The Washington Post article reported how technology is transforming the doctor-patient relationship. According to the article, “Susannah Fox, entrepreneur in residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, describes a “sea change in communications” over the past 15 years. “Consumers only used to get a filtered drip of information,” she said. “What the Internet did was pull open that funnel and give people more access — not complete access — to health information.” Almost three-quarters of American adults use the Internet to search online for health information each year, according to the Pew Research Center. While patients are digging through new information, so are doctors. A “tsunami of knowledge” from hundreds of journals pours over doctors, says Jack Cochran, executive director of the Permanente Federation. All this information changes the culture. “Doctors say they’re taught to know things that others don’t,” said Dave deBronkart, a cancer survivor and advocate for patient engagement. Today, thanks to online searches and communities, a patient may know about advances before a doctor does.”

An April 27, 2015 Engadget article reported that Samsung released a Backup Memory app “to stimulate the memories” of early-onset dementia patients. According to the article, “The Android tool uses Bluetooth to detect when friends and family running the app are nearby. If they are, it'll both identify the person and show user-uploaded photos and videos that recall past events. The app is currently very simple (Samsung still wants to add GPS locations, for instance), but it's reportedly promising enough in early tests that it's slowing down the effects of Alzheimer's and making life just a little bit easier.”