The Pharma Dispatch is a hand-curated newsletter compiled weekly to go beyond the headlines and bring you the most interesting developments related to the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical research from around the world.

Cancer update

38,000 oncologists attended American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting. Few key highlights:

1. Efforts to harness the immune system to fight cancer have yielded some big successes, but only in a minority of patients. The way to get the therapies to work in more people, researchers now say, is to use them in combination with something else. That means putting two immunotherapy medications together or trying them with targeted therapies or conventional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation.

2. Partly because of the possibility of expensive combination therapies, many doctors are fretting about costs and whether their patients will be able to afford promising new drugs.This is the new epidemic — people going under to pay for their drugs.

3. Loxo Oncology presented results that showed a drug called larotrectinib shrank tumors in 17 different cancers with a defect called a TRK fusion.If larotrectinib gets the nod, it will be another step toward basing treatments on genetic characteristics rather than the parts of the body where tumors originate.

4. The latest clinical trial results showed that adding a Johnson & Johnson drug called Zytiga, or abiraterone, to standard hormone therapy for men with newly diagnosed advanced prostate cancer reduced their chance of death by about 40 percent.

5. The little-known Chinese company Nanjing Legend Biotech surprised conference attendees on Monday with eye-popping results involving an experimental immunotherapy for multiple myeloma.

6. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of “The Emperor of All Maladies” and “The Gene,” struck an optimistic note. Cancer treatment is entering a promising, if challenging, adolescence, he said, and his fellow oncologists, after years of being hamstrung by a lack of technological tools and treatments, now have therapies to deploy in a “thoughtful, reasoned and compassionate way.”

Additional news from the event, included a knock-back for Roche's breast cancer combination therapy, better trial news for AstraZeneca's Lynparza drug, and research that showed sufferers using an app to report their symptoms extended their survival rate for several months.

US drug prices

The debate over the cost of medicines in the US is heating up as drugmakers, pharmacists, politicians, and middlemen fight over who is to blame. Big pharma spent a record $58m in political lobbying in 2016. Older people are most affected.

Profile of a Silicon Valley doctor — qz.com

Silicon Valley thinks our bodies need a reboot. PayPal founder and Donald Trump booster Peter Thiel, who plans to live for 120 years, has publicly discussed taking human-growth hormone (and expressed interest in blood transplants from young people). Google spun off Calico in 2013 to defeat the inevitability of aging. Software engineers fast for days and order custom “stacks” of nootropics, or brain-enhancing substances.

Dr. Mally Maloof, a general practitioner who works with Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs, discusses her data-driven approach to primary care, the perils of Bulletproof Coffee, and her expansive use of biomarkers.

Native wisdom

Can traditional healing practices be integrated into modern healthcare? The Nuka integrated system of care for the Alaska native community has become an international model of reform.

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]