The Research Evangelist

When speaking with people about cancer research over the years I often heard that a cure, or even advanced targeted treatments (especially for lung cancer) are just "pie in the sky" thinking. Of course, in my response now, I point to precision medicine approaches to treatment now available due to advances in genomic understanding about specific mutations in cancer. I heard the exact same thing a couple years ago when speaking with a parent of a child with Fragile X syndrome who asked me if using CRISPR to treat Fragile X was just "pie in the sky" - as in, is there a chance it could work, or is it just impossible? As an optimistic person, my answer was that given how rapidly technologies such as gene therapy and next generation sequencing are evolving, many things that seemed impossible are definitely not pie in the sky, even for complex disorders like Fragile X or diseases such as lung cancer. The context of that conversation was an article she had read about h

I read an article today in Vulture , the culture and entertainment site from New York Magazine about how Quibi , the long-hyped, mobile-centric streaming platform devoted to short-form programming had raised $1.75 billion. Quibi, the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio head and DreamWorks co-founder, had promised to reinvent television by streaming high-quality content in ten-minute-or-less chunks to “the TV in your pocket.” Given that  Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired, it seems like another example of a ton of money invested in an app that maybe people don't need. Which got me thinking about what a difference $1.75 billion would have made if invested in medical research. In particular, the impact almost 2 billion dollars would have on the research labs that are searching for treatments for patients with unmet medical needs. To give you an idea of what a billion dollars in research looks like, Mass General