Here, I aim to offer some additional ideas for how companies can best describe themselves and their products — and how PR agents, journalists, and others might describe them — by achieving the opposite of hype: clarity.  Continue Reading..

In my travels, I’ve especially noted three areas of unavoidable transformation due to forces quite beyond the industry’s control: women’s advocacy, the drug-pricing stalemate, and the new politics.  Continue Reading..

In the December 2017 issue’s article, “The Women of Biopharma — Will They Gain or Lose Ground in 2018?” we summarize the responses of those who chose to contribute as panelists in a “virtual roundtable” discussion. Here, as promised, we are posting their written responses in full.  Continue Reading..

Oncology isn’t the only therapeutic area subject to the hyperbole of hope. It is just the most perfect example of hype, an all-too-common state of mind in the “cancer community.  Continue Reading..

As a trade journalist, I often face the challenge of relevancy. Is what I’m writing about really useful and germane to readers as members of a particular industry?  Continue Reading..

When I leave my writer’s lair and go out into the world, I feel like the tortoise in a race of hares. People move around me at the speed of light, most lost in their screens, smiling at machines.  Continue Reading..

At BIO CEO many of the companies on my radar this year are in the metabolic/endocrinology area, over which diabetes has long reigned. But the area is now expanding noticeably into other spheres such as neurodegeneration and cardiovascular. As Albion Fitzgerald, chairman of CohBar, says “During the next 15 years, there will be five times as many deaths from noncommunicable diseases as from the old historic communicable diseases, and most...  Continue Reading..

At the JPM conference, I spend the bulk of my time meeting with a string of companies, but as various as they are, they all share the common challenge of risk and uncertainty in the development of human therapeutics. For us in the press, it can be tempting to toss companies into easy categories such as size, stage of research, market cap  - but then, it’s fun and interesting to let the patterns among the companies emerge spontaneously...  Continue Reading..

Like the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, DCAT is a gathering where most of the action is invisible to conference attendees. But DCAT also resembles a big market or bazaar, bringing people together to do business the best way it can be done — face to face — which no amount of social media, telecommunications, or remote sensing can replace.  Continue Reading..