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. Wrong Headed

The metaphor of “rewiring your brain” has taken hold. Apps, books, TED Talks, and blowhards are all selling tools for the job. This month, Paul Lukacs, a retired neurologist writing in Aeon, laments the development. According to Lukacs, the metaphor distorts the concept of neuroplasticity:

It implies an engineering project: a system whose parts can be removed, replaced and optimised. The promise is both alluring and oddly mechanical. The metaphor actually did come from engineering. To an engineer, rewiring means replacing old and faulty circuits with new ones. As the vocabulary of technology crept into everyday life, it brought with it a new way of thinking about the human mind…The science is sound, but its popular reception often strips away the conditions – time, repetition, constraint – under which such change occurs. To be ‘rewired’ suggests an all-or-nothing overhaul rather than nuanced progression. 

2. Pharma’s Two-Minute Drill

If you managed to stay awake during the Super Bowl, you may have noticed two things: the Patriots kept punting, and pharma kept advertising. MM+M assesses why pharma, unlike New England, chose to go for it:

James Ramelli, partner at digital media agency Fyllo, believes pharma’s big appetite for the Super Bowl this year is also driven by a need to take advantage of a big linear TV moment when certain regulatory challenges — like the FDA’s DTC ad crackdown and increasingly stringent data privacy laws — are looming.

“It’s maybe going to be a tumultuous year for marketing teams and pharma companies, and this is a good opportunity for them to do a big splashy thing while they still can,” he says.

3. Brains Still Matter

Javier Milei, Argentina’s chainsaw wielding president, recently argued in The Economist that AI will free humanity “from the constraints of the human brain.” Harris Eyre, a physician and neuroscientist with the Global Brain Economy Initiative, disagrees. In a letter to the editor, he argues Mr. Milei has it “exactly backwards”:

The human brain is now the scarcest and most valuable form of economic infrastructure. Sure, AI can imitate outputs, but it cannot replace what actually matters: original thought, ethical decision-making, creativity, adaptability and the ability to steer technological power responsibly. Far from being the bottleneck, the brain is the rare asset that increases in value as AI scales.

4. On Cells and Bananas

Eric Topol, writing on Substack, points to two shifts reshaping medicine. First, immunotherapies – especially CAR-T-based strategies, once confined to oncology – are moving into auto-immune disorders. This will have massive consequences for pharma, payers, and patients: 

This represents one of the biggest shifts in a domain of medicine that we’ve seen in decades. It has been stunning to see for the first time one-shot cures in patients who were refractory to all approved treatments. There’s a paucity of true cures in medicine. Considering that 1 in 10 people have an autoimmune disease, and these conditions have never garnered the level of attention as cancer, cardiovascular, or neurodegenerative diseases, these big steps of progress are especially welcome.

Second, the piece highlights the growing role of AI generated scientific illustration. To visualize his more abstract ideas, Dr. Topol used Nano Banana. The results are striking—and a warning to illustrators.

5. Is MAHA Sick?

First, the FDA said it would review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine. Then, it said it wouldn’t. Now, it says it will. David Wallace-Wells argues the reversals reveal deepening divisions within the MAHA coalition. Might MAHA be gasping its final breaths? 

Just among that leadership team, there are some who believe that the F.D.A. has long underregulated drugs, for instance, and others who believe it has overregulated them; there are some who believe the country has been robbed of biomedical advances by corruption and self-dealing and others who believe the country is already quite profoundly overmedicated; some who have argued that only randomized controlled trials can be trusted as scientific evidence, others who want to cut down the number of trials required of new drugs going forward and still others who have suggested that anecdotal evidence is sufficient to justify shifts in guidance and policy. Is it “gold standard science” to say, offhandedly, that schizophrenia could be treated by the keto diet? Is it “evidence-based medicine” to cite discredited science to blame Tylenol use by pregnant mothers for an illusory explosion in rates of autism?