BACK of the BOOK
Heard in the Blogosphere
Daniel Ortiz, MD
@danortizmd
#medstudents Regardless of #matchday results, keep
pressing on. It’ll work out. -victim match day 2012, successful
match day 2013.
Mark Reid, MD
@medicalaxioms
The worst doctors point out the errors of their colleagues.
The best tell you about their own. Thus you can differentiate
them
Sarah McLain
@SarahMcLain_
Hope the Haematologists like the cookies I made to say
thanks for a great term! #haematology #medschool
#LifeofaMedStudent
How Reliable Are Cancer Studies?
“Everyone wants us to paint the project in black and white. What
percent of these papers replicate? I’ve been asked that so many
times, but it’s not an easy question. … Figuring out exactly what
the original labs actually did is a problem. I’ve done it myself: you
reference a previous paper and that one references a paper and
that one references a paper, and now you’ve gone years and the
methodology doesn’t exist. Most people looking at these papers
wouldn’t even think of going through these steps. They’d just guess.
If you asked 20 different labs to replicate a paper, you’d end up with
10 different methodologies that aren’t really comparable.”
—Tim Errington, Metascience Manager at the Center for Open Science,
discussing the “reproducibility crisis” of cancer trials, in The Atlantic
The Health Data Conundrum
“There’s quite a paradox when it comes to our health data. Most
of us still cannot readily look at it, but there’s been an epidemic of
cybercriminals and thieves hacking and stealing this most personal
information. … We need to move on from the days of health systems
storing and owning all our health data. Patients should be the
owners of their own medical data. It’s an entitlement and civil right
that should be recognized.”
—Kathryn Haun, and Eric J. Topol, MD, in The New York Times
Repurposing Existing Drugs
for New Indications
In The Scientist, academic researchers and
scientists discuss the practice of resurrecting
failed drugs and recycling existing compounds
for novel indications.
Ido Weinberg, MD
@Angiologist
In modern medicine a big challenge is when *not* to treat.
Futile medicine: Abundant and often harmful.
ASH
@ASH_hematology
“There has been an incredible amount of
energy around repurposing in the last five
years that was not there previously. More and
more, people are thinking of repurposing as
a faster, cheaper, safer way to drive therapies
to patients and as a method of creating a
smarter way of new drug development. What I
like about drug repurposing is that it can solve
two issues: improved health-care impact and
reduced health-care cost. That’s a big driver
for us.”
—Bruce Bloom, CEO of Cures Within Reach
Here’s a group photo of our #HOA17 attendees in Hong
Kong [March 10-12]
“[Doctors] monitor for bad side effects of
drugs, but then we started to think, ‘Why
couldn’t we use electronic health records to
find potentially good effects of drugs?’”
—Hua Xu, PhD, Robert H. Graham Professor
at the School of Biomedical Informatics in The
University of Texas Health Science Center
“Repurposed generic drugs do not appear to be
good business cases. That’s the reality of repur-
posing. No company expects to make a profit.”
—Michael Pollak, MD, director of the Division
of Cancer Prevention in the Department of
Oncology at McGill University
Follow ASH and ASH Clinical News on:
@ASH_Hematology, @BloodJournal,
@BloodAdvances, and @ASHClinicalNews
Facebook.com/AmericanSocietyofHematology
@ASH_Hematology
ASHClinicalNews.org
ASH Clinical News
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