Ok, this is a departure from my normal biotech / research stuff, but there’s so much internet-stupidity going on that I want to post something about basic financial math.
Everyone has their panties in a bunch because the iPhone 3G costs less up front but “costs more over the life of the contract!” This is a bunch of crap, and people who believe that are also going to get screwed when they buy a car or a house.
Here’s the thing: you cannot compare 2 financial deals simply by adding up all of the payments and seeing which is bigger, because there is such a thing as the “time value of money.”
Continue reading ‘iPhone 3G costs are unchanged over first gen’
Andy Grove, the famous CEO of Intel, has spoken out publicly against the pharmaceutical industry. I’d like to comment on a few of his statements.
First a few words on my perspective. Before moving to biotech I actually had a stint in process development at Intel, so I’m pretty familiar with the industry and the technology. Now I’m in R&D in the biotech industry which, while not really the same as pharma in general, still gives me a good perspective on the challenges of drug development.
Mr. Grove is a very smart guy who’s been very successful in his industry. He’s not just a management-focused CEO, but an actual technical expert who’s made it to the top. My point here is just that he’s got a credible reputation for technical matters.
I picked the semiconductor industry because it’s the one I know; I spent 40 years in it, during which it became the foundation for all of electronics. It has done a bunch of unbelievable things, powering computers of increasing power and speed. But in the treatment of Parkinson’s, we have gone from levodopa to levodopa. ALS [Lou Gehrig's disease] has no good treatment; Alzheimer’s has none.
This is, unfortunately, a nonsensical comparison. Grove’s main point is that the semiconductor industry has made huge strides in 40 years but the pharma industry has not.
Continue reading ‘Andy Grove is mistaken about the drug industry’
Ars technica wrote an article using explanations of homeopathy as an example of how you can tell pseudoscience from real science. It’s not the most clearly written argument, but it covers the points.
A quick explanation of homeopathy: you put some “stuff” in water, then you dilute it. The real kicker is that in homeopathy you dilute the original solution so much that there are zero molecules of the original “stuff” in it. In fact, it’s claimed that the more you dilute it the more powerful it gets. When you drink the water it will have medicinal powers as a result of the water having “memory” of the stuff that was in it. And there really are zero molecules of stuff in the water. Let’s be clear: homeopathy has beneficial effect only through the placebo effect. There’s no evidence at all that there is such a thing as “water memory” or an inverse dose response (more diluted water works better).
Continue reading ‘Homeopathy as a case study of bad science’
You may have seen the stories going around the net today about a scientist who’s discovered how to burn salt water, and that the DOE is going to investigate this as an alternative source of energy. Let me explain why this is stupid.
Dr. Roy said the salt water isn’t burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water — sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen — and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame’s temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output.
Let me break this down for you, serious science style:
Continue reading ‘Burning salt water will not fuel your car’
I’m writing this for friends and family who may not be aware of the value of using RSS to keep up with news and periodically updated sites. If you learned about this post via your feed reader then you can skip this article…
Continue reading ‘Why you should use RSS & Google Reader’
I’ve been involved in a few discussions recently about stem cell research, and I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding, in addition to outright deception, going on in the public debates.
By way of introduction, I’m a Ph.D. researcher at a biotech drug company and I’ve been involved in research in academia as well. While I am involved in bacterial / mammalian cell fermentation, and not stem cells, I have a good understanding of this issue, and the technologies involved. It’s another example of attempts to politicize science, and politicize facts. The science says embryonic stem cells are the way to go. Period. End of story. If you think there’s a morally unjustifiable cost associate with those benefits then just say that. That’s an intellectually honest debate to have, and one that could be had in the public sphere.
Continue reading ‘Stem Cell Research’
Clinical trials are the statistical testing of new drug molecules in human patients to determine safety and effectiveness. You frequently hear about drugs having “promising results after Phase II clinical trials” and you may not know exactly what that means.
First, to be clear, a great deal of development effort goes into a candidate molecule before it ever enters a person. There will have been extensive lab tests, tests in animal models (an animal, such as a rat, which has a condition that mimics the human disease of interest) as well as toxicity tests in animals. In general, perhaps 1 in 1000 molecules makes it all the way to phase 1 trials. In biotech, the ratio is probably higher, but that should give you an idea. And once you enter into clinical trials, the majority (perhaps the great majority) of candidate drugs fail at each phase.
A quick summary is:
- Phase I - is it safe?
- Phase II - does it work?
- Phase III - fully, statistically define the drug
Continue reading ‘What are clinical trials?’
I’m a researcher in a pharmaceutical biotechnology company, and I’m concerned by the lack of public understanding about what it is we do. In this article I’ll explain some of the process of pharmaceutical manufacture at a biotechnology company, and how you go from a cell stored in liquid nitrogen to a vial of drug for injection. This is intended to be a readable, layman’s explanation of the process. My perspective is fermentation-centric, so apologies to the areas I can’t fully represent. In a later article I’ll discuss more of the research process, where I am involved. I’m also going to sprinkle the article with links to references that have more detail and explanations of technology or equipment.
The master cell bank
The basic concept in biotech is that you identify a molecule that you want, and the sequence of DNA that could be used to produce that molecule. Then you genetically engineer a cell line (CHO or E. coli) to produce it and come up with the correct bioreactor conditions so that they can grow and produce it. Once you have settled on this combination of cell and DNA you place that “master” cell line in liquid nitrogen for permanent storage. This is your gold standard copy from which all drug production starts. You probably have more than one master cell bank to protect you from things like fire and earthquake, since if you lose the master cell line you will have no FDA certified source of cells to produce your product! That would be bad.
The first step in production is to take some of your master cell bank and carefully grow it up in a bioreactor. The goal here is not to make any product, but just to make some more cells, which can then be frozen as a “working cell bank.” Because the master cell bank is so important you try to avoid accessing it as much as possible. Every now and then you take some master cells and create a new working stock.
Continue reading ‘How biotech drugs are produced’
There was an interesting article in the New York Times regarding the surprisingly large impact that the farm bill has on many aspects of life in the US and abroad. A pithy excerpt:
Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?
Continue reading ‘Why does a twinkie cost less than a carrot?’
Since I recently got into this whole blogging thing, and I’m someone who tends to exhaustively research anything I’m interested in ( I guess that’s why I like my job), I wanted to share a few tips for WordPress that I’ve worked out that may help others. One of those is determining exactly what is the right robots.txt file to use for your WordPress site. The goal is not so much SEO (search engine optimization) as it is to make sure the right content is being indexed by sites like Google, and the wrong stuff isn’t. I’ll break this down into somewhat basic terms for people who may be new to the process. There are a variety of blog posts on the subject, and I think I’ve compiled my own spin on the issue. The key is that you don’t want to block too much, so try to only block things that are meaningless to readers (like script files).
The root folder of your site can have a text file in it named robots.txt. This file contains some rules that you set that determine what files and folders you want to allow search engines to find, and which ones you want to label as being off-limits. Google has a bad rap for ignoring robots.txt files, but I believe that is coming from some confusion as far as how Google interprets this file. By playing with their robots.txt analysis tool I found something that I think many neophytes are missing.
First, a general primer. Below are the first few lines from my robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /blog/wp-*
Continue reading ‘A robots.txt for WordPress’