💊 10 things to read this weekend

Who is the best-positioned tech giant in healthcare? The answer might surprise you.

When you think about tech giants playing in healthcare, you think of Google, and the work Verily is doing; you think of Apple, and their HealthKit and ResearchKit applications, as well as their rumored plans to organize all your medical data on your iPhone; you may even think of Amazon and their potential entry in pharmacy segment.

The World HealthOrganization (WHO) warns that a drug-resistant form of the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea is on the rise. Also, the R&D pipeline for gonorrhoea is relatively empty, with only 3 new candidate drugs in various stages of clinical development.

Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Scotland-based AI startup Exscientia, discusses how machine learning is capable of accelerating drug design and discovery. Exscientia has partnered with Eli Lilly, GSK, and Janssen, among others.

Over the last several years, pain doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness. 

Drugmakers plunged off a patent cliff earlier this decade, losing billions in sales as lucrative branded drugs lost exclusivity. An expensive lobbying effort aimed at preventing a repeat is paying off.

Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are creating new drugs tailored to the needs of the world’s most-populous nation.

After pursuing an R&D odyssey that stretched out more than 15 years, little Emmaus Life Sciences in Torrance, CA has just won an FDA OK for Endari, the first new drug approved for sickle cell disease in close to 20 years.

Knee surgery marks new battleground for companies. The world's top medical technology companies are turning to robots to help with complex knee surgery, promising quicker procedures and better results in operations that often leave patients dissatisfied.

Telemedicine is a key component of medical care on the International Space Station. While doctors have always communicated with the crews of short missions, largely to guide them through acute spaceflight-specific health issues, today’s long-duration and exploration missions require space medicine to fulfill a much wider-ranging mandate and extend beyond minor illness and urgent care.

A report commissioned by Google's DeepMind Health has found National Health Service (NHS) doctors are using Snapchat to send patient scans or details of patient information to each other.

Thank You!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear which specific topics or sections you would like to know more about and in general, if you have any suggestions, please do write to me at: [email protected]