NOTES

From the minute an organism is born its cells and tissues are subject to an array of insults and injuries, some small and some major. While we have made progress on numerous fronts to prevent, treat, or slow many diseases, the holy grail remains regenerative therapies designed to replenish and repair tissue or organs impaired by disease, trauma, or congenital defects.

Notes on Animal Health

In re-making the world, how much value does the creatively destroying entrepreneur actually capture from their innovations?

Notes on Engineering Health

In the world of entrepreneurship, much of the game is played in an environment of uncertainty rather than risk. True uncertainty involves situations that are non-computable because we lack the information to calculate odds accurately. This is the land of the unknown and unknowable in which probabilities cannot be meaningfully assigned and thus the idea of probability itself becomes meaningless.

Notes on Engineering Health

Because the lifespans of our domestic pets are so much shorter than ours, inevitably pet owners experience the heartbreak of their death. But what if you could give your pet immortality, well, a type of immortality? Science has now given us the ability to clone our pets, and in doing so we can keep them alive, at least genetically, forever. But should we?

Notes on Animal Health

Last month we provided some notes on morphogenesis, the process by which organisms develop their specific dimensions and forms. This month we are back with some more thoughts on the intersection of mathematics (more geometry) and biology.

Notes on Engineering Health

Morphogenesis is the process by which organisms develop their specific dimensions and forms. It's nature's own sculpting technique, where cells organize themselves into tissues, organs, and entire bodies.

Notes on Engineering Health

Pets have never been more popular. It is estimated that 66% of U.S. households (86.9 million homes) own at least one pet, while globally approximately 33% of households keep one or more. Unfortunately, for a significant portion of the human population, pets come with a significant downside: allergies. The Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America estimates that 10-20% of the world’s population is affected by dog and/or cat allergies.

Notes on Animal Health

Slime molds are eukaryotic organisms that are neither plants, animals, nor fungi. They have a complex life cycle that includes both single-cell and multicellular stages. They are commonly found in moist, shaded areas like forest floors feeding on microorganisms and dead plant material. And, despite lacking a brain or nervous system, slime molds can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, one of the most notorious optimization challenges in computer science.

Notes on Engineering Health

Is environmental health the same as ecological health? Can we reconcile the tools we use to protect the environment with the ones we use to protect human life?

Notes on Engineering Health

Over the past year, I’ve been collecting papers with surprising results about the success of machine learning in biology, ones that run against the grain of popular conceptions, that throw into question whether our models are learning biology at all. Papers that demonstrate models fixating on patterns in datasets that are too complex for a human to identify that turn out to be noise, not signal.

Engineering Biology

With the Paris 2024 Olympics rapidly approaching, many of us are looking forward to watching the best human athletes in the world compete for their home countries. As amazing as many of these athletes are, one wonders how other animals, specifically other land mammals, might compare.

Notes on Animal Health

As part of our notes of the US healthcare system (see our earlier pieces on payers, Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), and providers), today we offer some notes on pharmacies. How did their role expand from the first apothecaries to the modern tech firms tasked with the safe distribution of drugs to the public?

Notes on Engineering Health

The early pioneers who first used radioactive compounds in medicine died young and badly damaged—Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia in her sixties; Henri Becquerel died of a heart attack in his fifties, his skin covered in burns from radioactive emissions; Irène Joliot-Curie died from acute leukemia; and her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, from liver disease. Undoubtedly, they were afflicted by their research, finding and analyzing radioactive elements, which opened up an entirely new field of study: radiopharmaceuticals and nuclear medicine.

Notes on Engineering Health

Many of us know instinctually that our pets are good for us. Now there is a growing body of evidence to support that belief. But are people good for pets?

Notes on Animal Health

The hardest problem in biopharma today is picking the right targets. Our ability to modify biology has increased exponentially over the past decades. No longer is it a question of if we can hit a target (or a pathway) with some compound. Today, we can hit nearly any biological target with multiple different modalities from traditional small molecules to antibodies to interfering RNAs to cell and gene therapies and beyond. The key questions today are what should we hit and how.

Engineering Biology

As medicine has grown more complex and costly, the way to organize its delivery has had to adapt. How has the work of delivering care evolved, how has it been integrated with the health insurance system, and what trends have emerged that point to ways in which hospitals may continue to evolve?

Notes on Engineering Health

Over at the new OpenProtein.ai blog, Tristan Bepler and I wrote about the seemingly mysterious power of Deep Protein Language Models. Not only do they identify related proteins, they predict functionality, stability, and immunogenicity, in many cases “out-of-the-box.” Why should this be?

Engineering Biology

Ross Katz from CorrDyn generously hosted me on the Data in Biotech podcast last week.

Engineering Biology

Scientific publications have been the lingua franca of scientific discovery and knowledge, the edifice on which trust is built. To understand how academic publishing got to the structure we know today and think of ways to improve it, it is helpful to understand the story of scholarly publishing, the technological advances that occurred along the way, and the forces and incentives that shape current behaviors and challenges.

Notes on Engineering Health

The difference in the prevalence of coronary artery disease (CAD) between dogs and humans is particularly striking when one considers that the dog has been proposed to be a model for human aging and mortality.

Notes on Animal Health

For this third installment of our series about the American healthcare system, we cover the pharmacy benefit managers (or PBMs), an idiosyncratic and opaque player unique to the American system.

Notes on Engineering Health

Stranded airplanes, packages arriving months late, organizations caught in endless spin unable to make decisions. Stories like these expose broken systems and paradigms that have failed to scale and reveal a quiet truth: the world is not as digitized as it seems.

Engineering Biology

As is now a tradition, our last missive of the year is an opportunity for us to reflect on the topics we covered earlier in the year in our Notes on Engineering Health and see if any updates are in order.

Notes on Engineering Health

For many of us, our pets truly are part of our family. They share our homes, our beds, go to work and on vacation with us. They entertain us and protect us. They will be by our sides and on our laps as we celebrate this holiday season with family and friends. We keep our pets close with little concern that they might share fleas, ticks, and intestinal parasites with us. That, however, has not always been the case.

Notes on Animal Health

The late neurologist Oliver Sacks had his fair share of experience with experiments on chemical compounds altering brain functions. He wrote beautifully in books and articles about how he experimented on himself both to relieve pain and to explore unvisited corners of his self. He was a keen observer of how mental diseases work and what is available to treat them. How did we get to produce such neuro-active compounds? Are the nervous system and the brain like any other organs? Where is neuropharmacology going?

Notes on Engineering Health