Patient information should be tailored to health literacy and level of education. It’s very difficult to make those assumptions so perhaps we should simply offer different levels of detail and let the patient choose the most appropriate.

To acknoweldge the very real limitations of mouse models – which all scientists would – is very different to saying they are not tremendously useful in research.

They don’t recapitulate all aspects of human disease, but they do so a lot better than other lab models – cell lines, computer modelling, etc. Monocultured cells don’t have vascular systems, fully functioning organs, etc, but mice – even ‘homogenised’ ones – do.

And – to clarify – Weinberg wasn’t saying mouse models aren’t useful. He was saying we need less ‘inefficient’ (my word, not his) models. I.e. he was advocating the development of better ways to model human disease, which includes improving current mouse models.

Reducing the attrition rate in drug development is a major challenge. There are many steps between the Petri dish and the patient, each one could lead to a drug candidate stumbling into the ‘valley of death’.

(Inneffient animal models aren’t the only hurdle – e.g. genetic differences in patients with seemingly the same disease mean they respond differently to the same drug; are we selecting the right patients for the right clinical trials? etc)

Mice aren’t humans, but they are closer to humans than cells in a dish.

Finally, you might like this article in the NYT – http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/helping-new-drugs-out-of-academias-valley-of-death/

Either way, I can’t drive.

Happy Easter Beez.

Viktor Frankl is an awesome thinker. ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ came out number one in a recent poll I conducted with my LinkedIn groups on their top ten leadership books.

His book is about survival, self-leadership and the power of positive thinking. It is the story of one man’s fight for survival in Auschwitz. My favourite quote is:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.

If you can think that way through the Holocaust, you can think your way through anything.

Check out which other books were recommended here:

http://zomicommunicationsantoinette.blogspot.com/2011/01/seeking-inspiration-leadership-and.html

Antoinette

It’s a powerful achievement to have one side of the audience fired up than have none of the audience fired up. The fired up will leave to create new experiences.

No great leaps in human thinking and innovation occured through under reaching. We need to break through the fear. Surely, we’re past the ‘education and enrolement’ phase of embracing digital – let’s talk tangible potential and the future – that’s where the passion needs to reside not just…well, ‘let’s add a twitter acount to this site!’

Congress organizers and their expert steering panels need to embrace a real, unpredictable form of adventure – take a risk – go out on a limb…push the discussion and debate to areas where the audience can actually accompany them on a journey to a place they didn’t know existed.

The acronymn www once stood for world wide web, but in my mind it’s more like the wild wild west. Only those that breach the frontier will carry the laggards forward…one way or another they’ll acquience. Who wants to be MOR, anyway?