By Kingshuk K. Sinha This post is part of a series on how patients are creating the future of medicine. The introduction to the series is available here, and all posts in the series are available here. While the promise and potential of precision medicine are clear, delivering on that promise and making precision medicine…
By Seán Finan Last week, I saw Dr Atul Gawande speak at Health Action 2017. Healthcare advocates and activists sat around scribbling notes and clutching at their choice of whole-food, cold-pressed, green and caffeinated morning lifelines. Gawande speaks softly, lyrically and firmly; the perfect bedside manner for healthcare advocates in these early days of the…
Looking Forward: The Next Generation of Bio similars February 7, 2017 12:00 PM Description Many of today’s important medications are biological products made from living organisms, manufactured through biotechnology, derived from natural sources, or produced synthetically. Biosimilars are a type of biological product approved by FDA on the basis of being highly similar to an…
By Brad Segal In January of this year, Cell published a study modestly titled, Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. It reports success bioengineering a mostly-pig partly-human embryo. One day before, Nature published a report that scientists had grown (for lack of a better word) a functioning genetically-mouse pancreas within the body of a…
Looking Forward: The Next Generation of Bio similars February 7, 2017 12:00 PM Description Many of today’s important medications are biological products made from living organisms, manufactured through biotechnology, derived from natural sources, or produced synthetically. Biosimilars are a type of biological product approved by FDA on the basis of being highly similar to an…
By Adrian Thorogood, BCL, LLB If every individual has millions of unique variants in their DNA, how can clinicians be expected to tease out a handful of disease causing mutations from a haystack of inconsequential variants? To aid their cause, public human genomic variant databases have sprung up to catalog variants that cause (or do not…
By Seán Finan Almost any test can return incidental results. An incidental result is something demonstrated by the test but not an answer to the test’s original question. Trying on a new pair of trousers, for example, can tell you whether or not they fit. It can also return the incidental result that the holiday…
By Wendy Kramer[In response to Sperm donor anonymity and compensation: an experiment with American sperm donors, published in the Journal of the Law and Biosciences.] My son Ryan and I were contacted by Family Tree DNA in 2004, as they thought that their new commercial DNA testing capabilities might be useful to Ryan, and to the…
By Linnea Laestadius, PhD, MPP Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies are now a fixture of U.S. consumer culture, with dozens of companies offering adults on-demand insights into their ancestry and health (sometimes loosely defined). While a compelling argument can be made for giving consumers the right to access information about their own genetic material, DTC-testing presents…
By Seán Finan Last week, a patent application in India was refused, apparently on the basis that the invention under review could have been used to counterfeit money. This practice of denying patents on the basis of public policy or morality is almost as old as the practice of granting patents. For example, the State of Monopolies…
