Every Week, MedCity News highlights the best of its MedCitizens: syndication partners and MedCity News readers who discuss life science current events on MedCityNews.com.
Now here’s the best of what YOU had to say:
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
The mythical emerging medical device ‘platform’ company. “The reality is that most emerging medical device companies succeed not because they have an expansive platform technology, but because they have a lead product that works and doesn’t kill anybody. Most med tech investors don’t fund platforms, they fund products. Of course, the business plans of development stage device companies have to expound on the platform potential to look like they have multiple shots on goal, but having one really good shot is what drives valuations.”
New azithromycin study is no way to judge antibiotic’s heart risk. “To think that despite all of the confounding factors that the authors had the balls to state that ‘as compared with amoxacillin that there were 47 additional deaths per 1 million courses of azithromycin therapy; for patients with the highest decile of baseline risk of cardiovascular disease, there were 245 additional cardiovascular deaths per 1 million courses’ is ridiculous. Seriously, after all the manipulation of data, they are capable of defining a magnitude to three significant digits out o fa million of anything?”
The reason behind the prostate cancer screening outrage? Money. “Men who have been through this are convinced that it saved their lives, because who wants to admit that they went through all that for nothing? The doctors who treat them don’t want to admit that they have been paid big bucks to harm people all these years either. And all the celebrities who made PSAs to promote PSA don’t want to think they’ve been tools either.”
Radioactive firefighter illustrates the merits of a medical home. “Of course this man benefited from a stress test. His doctor listened to his symptoms, considered his high-risk job, assessed his physical findings and came to a shared decision in a patient centered model. Together, inside the warm confines of a medical home, the informed patient and enlightened doctor decided that a nuclear stress test was the best means to stratify his risk of heart disease.”
New Castlight Health president describes his plans for $100 million Series D funds. “‘Health care has systematically under invested in technology and software. One of the reasons why we feel like we need to raise a lot of capital is because there’s a lot of opportunity to invest in tools, technologies and services. As customers are demanding those services, we needed the capital to scale with quality.'”
