Here is an interesting survey from Quintiles, the large clinical outsourcing company, on how different groups perceive the value of new drugs.

The first problem is that not everyone can agree on what’s valuable. Surveying managed-care people and physicians, the number one factor mentioned is cost. Biopharma respondents mentioned cost, but were more weighted toward outcomes (which, for example, was a factor in only 10% of the physician responses). Patients … …

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Venture-capital guy Bruce Booth has a provocative post, based on experience, about how reproducible those papers are that make you say, “Someone should try to start a company around that stuff”:

The unspoken rule is that at least 50% of the studies published even in top tier academic journals – Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, etc… – can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. In particular, …

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Well, the nuclear crisis in Japan seems to be causing a run on potassium iodide (KI), and not just in Japan.

If news reports are to be believed, people in many other regions (such as the west coast of the US and Canada) are stocking up, and some of these people may have already started dosing themselves.

Don’t do that. Don’t …

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