The FDA is sitting on a goldmine of drug development data — 10,000+ page dossiers detailing how drugs are designed, made, tested, and approved.

Big Pharma has these in-house. Startups? Locked out.

It’s time to fix that. Read my proposal for @IFP on how.
ifp.org/biotechs-lost-… These filings — called Common Technical Documents (CTDs) — contain all the info on getting a drug approved:
1) Chemistry & manufacturing methods 🧪
2) Clinical trial results 📊
3) Safety data ⚠️
Every interaction with the FDA. They’re regulatory maps.

Everyone here knows I'm as far from a Communism fan as one can be, but it's worth pondering that even within that system becoming the President probs required high intelligence. Both Nicolae & Elena Ceausescu had very little formal education but their children ...
Zoia Ceausescu, their daughter, got a PhD in Math (against her parents' wishes, who wanted her to be more involved in politics) and worked as a researcher at the National Math Institute

I've written a lot abt the need to advance the science of fertility so women can take control of their reproductive timelines & have how many babies they want, when they want. This is feminism. What the article below is, from a self-proclaimed "feminist", is nihilism. Debunk 🧵 Disclaimer: some women simply don't want children. That's completely fine! Children aren't for everyone. But the arguments in this article are simply bad. They exhibit what in CBT terms would be described as "catastrophizing"

Egan is right.

China still takes more for NDA submissions (tho it's also true they've cut it a lot compared to themselves years ago via the 2015 reforms).

They're better in other ways.

https://twitter.com/eganpeltan/status/1915477710316724425

My understanding from talking to people who ran trials in both China and US is that the extra speed comes mainly from:
1) Their FDA seems to accept a wider diversity of data including more stuff from investigational led trials which afaik are much harder to include in US

I was saying this exactly 2 years ago when it was highly unpopular and Evth since then has proven me right. Science aligning itself with politics has hurt it. And people at the top like Holden are responsible for it.

https://twitter.com/ruxandrateslo/status/1638479829036154881

This is when scientific American endorsed Kamala Harris and some of our brightest science communicators cheered it

x.com/ruxandrateslo/… x.com/ruxandrateslo/…

I wrote an entire post abt this. Imo, that's not the issue. Modern biology was in large part invented by physicists/ physical chemists/ mathematicians. Crick was a physicist. All the early protein crystallographers were physical chemists.

writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-b… Yes, there was a time when protein structures weren't solvable with the latest software. Where you needed to know Maths etc. Elspeth Garman, distinguished professor of protein crystallography in the Oxford Biochem department when I was there was a physicist by training

One's 30s are a crucial period for professional advancement. Especially in so-called "greedy careers": those where returns to longer hours are non-linear.

But one's mid 30s is also when most women's fertility starts to drop 🧵

worksinprogress.co/issue/fertilit… In this piece, I lay out how a large part of the "gender pay gap" is just this: a motherhood pay gap. And, as Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin points out, this is particularly true in high-stakes careers like business, law, medicine, entrepreneurship and so on.

I'm often critical of scientists, but the fact that such studies exist stands testament to the relative lack of corruption and impartiality of Western institutions. Also, Alex is being misleading here. Let me explain 🧵

https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1892194302790336655

Firstly: what is T cell exhaustion? It's a natural state T cells (a type of immune cell) can find themselves in after being stimulated by antigens for a prolonged period of time.

Exhausted T cells become less capable of dividing and performing their natural, healthy functions.

I understand that getting a health claim denied is personally devastating, but without denying claims, is the insurance industry even viable? It seems to me like there's a lot of rent seeking in healthcare and some procedure prices are too high, but is this the fault of insurance companies? Like, there's a finite amount of money that can go to healthcare and someone needs to manage who gets what.

In places like UK, where healthcare is socialised, you are also "denied" procedures, albeit not by a specific company.

Why and how did Late Roman Aristocrats become Christian? This book tries to answer what is seemingly a a paradox (given that Christian values are seemingly at odds with Roman aristocratic values) 🧵:

A lot of emphasis placed on explaining this via status mechanisms, as the author puts it well here:

“The aristocrat’s concern for belonging to the right status group extended to religion. Senatorial aristocrats traditionally sought pagan priesthoods because they offered another arena in which to demonstrate and augment honor; pagan ceremonies, rituals, festivals, and holidays had for centuries allowed the aristocrat to assert preeminence in public. At home pagan family rites reinforced the patriarchal social order, conferring prestige on male aristocrats. In private cultic settings the aristocrat gained honor before his peers. To western aristocrats in the early fourth century, then, adopting Christianity presented a special sort of problem. How would changing religion affect their lifestyle and the institutions and values by which they lived? Most important from an aristocrat’s perspective, would the adoption of Christianity entail a loss of status?” Defining the Senatorial Aristocracy

“Perhaps the most important non official criterion for membership in the senatorial aristocracy is the one hardest to trace from a distance, namely acceptance by fellow aristocrats. Symmachus pointed to the weight placed upon peer approval in a speech delivered to the Roman senate concerning one Valerius Fortunatus who, upon reaching maturity, “vowed to recover that which which he had sought on the grounds of his birth, perhaps at the instigation of good breeding, which always recognises itself”

Symmachus argues that the young man ought to be admitted to the senate, despite his poverty, for his birth and good breeding made him easily recognisable as “one of us”.

The need for affirmation of inborn aristocratic by his peers points to a key fact of aristocratic life: aristocrats needed mutual recognition and acceptance. In essence, they defined each other. Recognition could compensate for even modest birth or inadequate wealth”