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..

Orlando, the city of warmth and happiness by design, hosted the Endocrine Society’s annual ENDO event this year, overlapping the Washington, DC-hosted AACR, the yearly confab by the American Association for Cancer Research, by several days. I was determined to visit both shows.  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..

Because I live only a day-trip away from San Francisco, it is convenient for me to travel there for industry events — a trek always accompanied by reflective reveries for the hometown of my film-student days. So, for the third time since June, and with another week scheduled for early January, I am once again city-bound, leaving home mid-day and getting into my hotel in plenty of time to make the 5:30 PM reception for the annual Pantheon...  Continue Reading..