Development and Research

When the CEO of Walmart explained why his company was partnering with a U.S. global AIDS program, he didn't mention humanitarian concerns. He said Walmart couldn’t make its ten-year growth projections without a healthy, economically growing Africa—because a sick continent disrupted supply chains and eliminated future customers. I’m joined this week by  Ambassador Mark Dybul , one of the architects...

Don't look now, but there are bacteriophages on your shoes. And if you scraped off a sample and sent them to a phage biology lab, one strain of them might turn out to be a natural, targeted predator for an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection that a surgery patient has been fighting for the past year. I'm joined this week by Jessica Sacher , a Stanford phage biologist, cofounder of Pha...

Most venture capitalists avoid infectious disease because the sickest patients live in countries that can't pay for expensive medicine—and because a one-time treatment can charge only a fraction of what a lifetime chronic drug can. Then again, one-time treatments for patients aged 18-30 in the developing world can be 10× to 100× cheaper to study than the Big Pharma playbook would have you beli...

I'm joined this week by Brian Finrow , CEO of Lumen Bioscience , who thinks we would be better off if we grew more drugs in algae, and fewer in Chinese Hamster Ovary cells. We talk about why "monoclonal antibodies" are particularly safe and effective as drugs—but incredibly expensive to manufacture—and whether the fundamental problem of the biotech industry is that everyone just has...

I'm joined this week by Meri Beckwith , who founded  Lindus Health  after being a clinical trial patient—because he was astounded at how badly clinical drug trials were being run by the world's leading companies. We talk about why clinical trials companies are twenty years behind in adopting new technologies, how a flooded supply closet can cause a billion-dollar clinical trial to fail, an...

Development & Research is a video series about doing things differently in the world of clinical trials. Development and Research is produced by Samuel Cottrell (hath.blog) Thank you to Michael Curzi at Hallsong Media (hallsong.com) for producing the trailer.