Informed Consent.
The new science of inflammation.
1. MIT Technology Review:
As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to apply to a newly established review board for approval. Once its treatment is rubber-stamped, the company can set the price of the drug and sell it via experimental treatment clinics, the first of which is likely to be up and running around the end of this year.
Montana’s latest right-to-try legislation is unique. While other jurisdictions with similar laws limit access to drugs to people with terminal illness, in Montana access is theoretically available to anyone who gives informed consent and can pay. That includes people desperate for treatments for rare diseases. It also includes those who are interested in longevity and want to try out drugs pitched as preventive therapies. (Source: technologyreview.com)
2. Kim Tingley on “the new science of inflammation”:
Traditionally, we have sorted diseases into categories, separating contagious from noncontagious illnesses; acute events like strokes from chronic conditions like asthma; diseases of cell proliferation, like cancer, from diseases of cell death, like Alzheimer’s; and those that affect one organ or bodily system from those that impact another. Our medical disciplines reflect this logic, too. But we have lately realized how interconnected the body’s systems really are. More and more, researchers are starting to see things the way that Peter Libby, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Mass General Brigham, put it to me: “We all study the same disease” — inflammation is involved with everything. (Sources: linkedin.com, nytimes.com. Read the whole thing.)
3. The four big hyperscalers have plowed more than $1 trillion into capital investments since their race to dominate AI began three and a half years ago, as America’s largest tech groups bet their future on the technology. Combined capital spending by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta from the beginning of the AI boom in 2023 to the end of June hit $1.1 trillion, according to earnings reports from the four companies in the past two weeks. The massive expenditure is a mark of both the scale of their AI ambitions and the speed with which the US tech giants have turned from capital-light businesses into huge investors in physical infrastructure. (Source: ft.com)
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