Brendan

They earned it. They deserve it. NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY! The golden age for seniors' golden years. 🇺🇸

JUST IN: Google DeepMind hires a philosopher as it prepares for machine consciousness.

Over 50,000 people in the U.S. die from pancreatic cancer every year. After this drug is approved and widely used, that number will remain essentially the same. In absolute terms, they are reporting a median survival shift of around six months. Yet we know resistance inevitably develops, as it does in all cancers subjected to drugs targeting mutations in the RAS/MAPK/PI3K pathway. If the goal is to meaningfully reduce cancer mortality, this does not move the needle. This is where decades of focus and billions in NIH/NCI funding have concentrated. National Cancer Institute is funded at roughly $9 billion per year, and a substantial portion of that budget is devoted to oncogenes and what is marketed as targeted therapies. This is then layered on top of a drug development and healthcare model where drugs like this can cost over $100,000 per patient. These are incremental gains at the late metastatic stage, where the biology is already stacked against you. Meanwhile, the two areas that actually determine population-level outcomes—early detection and prevention—remain neglected. If we are serious about reducing the number of people who die from pancreatic cancer, the priority cannot be continuing to optimize late-stage interventions that predictably yield temporary gains. The goal should be zero deaths. Right now, we are not on a path that gets us there. It is not surprising that this view is being met with backlash. Much of the criticism is coming from people whose incentives—academic , financial, or institutional—are tied to maintaining the current system in biomedical research and the biotech and pharma sectors that profit from it.

When you buy Eli Lilly, you're betting on 50+ drugs, revenues, management, and macro Billions of dollars are allocated based on internal optimism and press releases - often greatly influenced by the one party with the most incentive to be optimistic (the sponsor of the trial) This is while: - 90% of drugs entering clinical trials never get approved - 40-50% of drugs fail in stage 3 - The average duration from phase 1 to approval is 10.5 years Until now, there hasn't been a good way to "strip" out specific exposure on whether or not a drug works A prediction market on a specific trial creates that instrument, & the 2nd-order effect is where it gets interesting - when experts (with money at stake) are publicly pricing a phase 3 at 15%, sponsors have to answer to that number. It gets harder to advance trials propped up by “internal optimism” (or financial motives) I love this because 1- it reorients pharma to focus on successful outcomes instead of wasting a decade on trials that won't work (each one is under a microscope), and 2- patients deserve better data on the probability of success rather than relying on a sponsor's press release

Over 50,000 people in the U.S. die from pancreatic cancer every year. After this drug is approved and widely used, that number will remain essentially the same. In absolute terms, they are reporting a median survival shift of around six months. Yet we know resistance inevitably develops, as it does in all cancers subjected to drugs targeting mutations in the RAS/MAPK/PI3K pathway. If the goal is to meaningfully reduce cancer mortality, this does not move the needle. This is where decades of focus and billions in NIH/NCI funding have concentrated. National Cancer Institute is funded at roughly $9 billion per year, and a substantial portion of that budget is devoted to oncogenes and what is marketed as targeted therapies. This is then layered on top of a drug development and healthcare model where drugs like this can cost over $100,000 per patient. These are incremental gains at the late metastatic stage, where the biology is already stacked against you. Meanwhile, the two areas that actually determine population-level outcomes—early detection and prevention—remain neglected. If we are serious about reducing the number of people who die from pancreatic cancer, the priority cannot be continuing to optimize late-stage interventions that predictably yield temporary gains. The goal should be zero deaths. Right now, we are not on a path that gets us there. It is not surprising that this view is being met with backlash. Much of the criticism is coming from people whose incentives—academic , financial, or institutional—are tied to maintaining the current system in biomedical research and the biotech and pharma sectors that profit from it.