Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. The War of Attrition on Cancer

Forget the moonshot. The Economist shows how the slow, persistent build of scientific and medical progress against cancer is what has changed outcomes – and extended lives:

What some scientists hoped would be a blitzkrieg has turned out to be a steady but successful war of attrition. Some victories have been spectacular. Childhood leukemia used to be virtually a death sentence; now it has a five-year survival rate above 90%. Yet because cancer is not one illness, but a whole category, much of the progress has come not from big breakthroughs, but thousands of smaller advances in screening, surgery and drugs.

2. Understanding Schizophrenias

Schizophrenia may be best understood not as a disease, but as a category of diseases. The New Yorker explores cases of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, who were suffering from “auto-immune psychosis” – and achieved miraculous recoveries. Scientists say it reveals a larger promise:

“You get lulled into this sense that, because the drugs are one-size-fits-all, the disease is also one-size-fits-all,” said [Andrew Miller, psychiatry researcher at Emory School of Medicine.] “With autoimmune psychosis, it’s so clear that there is something different. And then you start to say, ‘Hey, is it possible that there are other clear-cut mechanisms to pathology that we’re missing because we’re lumping everyone together and saying they all have the same illness?’”

So far, researchers have discovered around 20 antibodies linked to psychiatric symptoms. They say that may be “a drop in the bucket.”

3. China’s Got Talent

In just a decade, China jumped from developing 2% of drugs to 25%. And they’re licensing a record number of deals. Fast Company examines why:

A boost in funding and regulatory changes opened the door, but access to the right talent has taken China across the threshold into a pharmaceutical golden age. Scientists from China and other parts of Asia used to come to the U.S. to work for the biggest drug companies and with the brightest minds. Now, many experts are heading East to fill China’s labs, and this return began well before the current administration took office. The result? A huge increase in the quality and quantity of novel Chinese medicines in development.

4. Parent, Founder, CEO

 Nature profiles a very specific kind of biotech founder: parents working to cure their child’s rare disease. It’s more common than you might think. A Slack channel for the community now has more than 400 members. What they say:

The personal mission can make you “less patient” and “more blunt and candid”, says [Brad Margus, founder of Perlegen Sciences]. A large proportion of people in biotech have a personal connection to the field: “They’ve got a mother who’s cognitively declining or they’ve got a kid with something.” At Tevard Biosciences in Boston, which Fischer co-founded in 2017 together with another Dravet parent, the leadership thinks hard about being patient-focused, he says, by bringing families in to talk to the team, for example. “I always tell our employees, ‘I know we’re working with cell lines and mice, but in the end, remember we’re working for kids and I have one at home.’”

5. A Capital Idea

Brain health faces an age-old problem. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure – but only if you can convince someone to pay for it. Writing in ThinkGlobalHealth, a group of experts and advocates rally the evidence for the concept of “brain capital”:

According to the McKinsey Health Institute, if stakeholders invested proactively in employee health and well-being, including brain health, global GDP (gross domestic product) could increase by up to 12%, unlocking $11.7 trillion in global economic value. … Despite this, only 1% to 2% of global health financing is allocated to mental health, and just 12% of countries have dedicated budgets for neurological care. 

Policymakers and businesses should accelerate investment in a global economic model that optimizes the performance and health of the most complex and efficient structure in the known universe: the human brain..