In the animal kingdom, the vivid plumage of a tropical bird is (for other birds) a reliable indicator of the creature’s health and reproductive vitality. Likewise, the size and splendor of a trade show exhibitor’s booth is an indicator of the financial health of the company sponsoring it. If elk…more...

Despite the fact that some European biotechs have been touting microdosing as the next big thing, sponsors in the U.S. are still not rushing out in great numbers to give the extremely low-dose trials a whirl. In fact, says the FDA‘s David Jacobson-Kram, associate director of pharmacology and toxicology in…more...

Last month, we had occasion to ponder some of the questions that philosophers have always wrestled with. Is a half-deaf reporter at an unfair advantage to his peers, simply because of a fifty percent reduction in confusing information coming into his brain? Since doctors believe they should not be anywhere…more...

Wygenia Brisco, an assistant director at Abbott, was on the agenda at the Clinical Trials Congress, held earlier this winter in Las Vegas. We’ve heard a few diplomatic and platitude-filled lectures on patient recruitment over the years. This is not Brisco’s style. At all. She’s more spirited, more inclined to…more...

There are great hopes but more than a little uncertainty around whether the pharmaceutical industry will ever have the technical means or the political latitude to mine troves of data in electronic health records. Some people point to pilot projects in this arena and exult, “See, it already works!” Others…more...

We’ve been as surprised as anyone by the Wall Street Journal’s running baseball-style scorecards showing how many lawsuits Merck has won, lost and tied. It’s notable. Merck is using a starkly different strategy than the one that was popular not that long ago. Remember the Fen-Phen mess? That saga is…more...

Is this a good time to switch jobs in the life sciences? Korn/Ferry International’s office managing director, Bob Ferguson, says it may be. He’s a ten-year veteran of the firm and is currently based in Seattle, though he put in more than a few years in Princeton, New Jersey. Need…more...

John Orloff is VP of development at Novartis. Like other keynote speakers at the recent Clinical Trials Congress, he’s not inclined to coat the industry’s predicament in sugar. “R&D expenditures are soaring at a time when new medical entity approvals are stagnating,” he said. “This is a paradigm that is…more...

They may be the most inspiring words one can hear at a conference. One certainly doesn’t hear them very often. But at last week’s Clinical Trial Congress (CTC), we heard a version of one of our favorite sentences: “And we didn’t have to do a single trial.” Ahhh. We have…more...

Doctors are trained to deliver bad news in a gentle, sensitive manner. Alan Breier, chief medical officer of Eli Lilly, may have missed that lecture. A psychiatrist and former academic, Breier took the podium at the Clinical Trials Congress in Las Vegas and bluntly declared that many of the major…more...