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. Overdue

Time to renew your library card. For industry strategies that want to be on front lines of care, they’ll need to return to the reading rooms. The Walrus outlines why the library has become an underserved site of care:

Talk to library workers and you’ll find people eagerly going beyond any reasonable description of their duties. The average library page—the precarious workers, often students, who shelve, tidy, and organize books—makes $16.50 an hour at Toronto Public Library. Librarians—all of whom have master’s degrees—earn between $72,054 and $81,372 a year. Both are on the front lines, and both have seen their responsibilities expand, doing work today that might otherwise be done by a social worker, an early childhood educator, a harm-reduction expert, a therapist, or a settlement worker.

2. ARPA-H – tl;dr

The Congressional Research Service recently released a 20-page white paper, “Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H): Overview and Selected Issues.”

We didn’t make it past the first page, either.

But we did upload it to humata.ai. And we asked: “What does ARPA-H mean to pharma?” The answer didn’t disappoint:

The establishment of ARPA-H may have implications for the pharmaceutical industry, as the agency is designed to accelerate high-risk, high-reward biomedical research and innovation that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional federal biomedical R&D programs or commercial activity. Some empirical research suggests that both the pharmaceutical industry and NIH underinvest in high-risk R&D. However, the impact of ARPA-H on the pharmaceutical industry will depend on the specific research projects selected and funded by the agency. 

3. Can Generative AI Accelerate Drug Discovery?

McKinsey offers its perspective on “what CEOs should know about generative AI.” One area they explore is drug discovery. Their analysis reaches a milestone conclusion: maybe. Given costs of AI drug discovery, the computers aren’t taking over the lab coats just yet:

In general, training a model from scratch costs ten to 20 times more than building software around a model API. Larger teams (including, for example, PhD-level machine learning experts) and higher compute and storage spending account for the differences in cost. The projected cost of training a foundation model varies widely based on the desired model performance level and modeling complexity. Those factors influence the required size of the data set, team composition, and compute resources. In this use case, the engineering team and the ongoing cloud expenses accounted for the majority of costs.

4. Made and Unmade in China

China is becoming increasingly vital to the global pharmaceutical trade. Yet it is also becoming increasingly hostile to foreign business. The Economist sees a gathering of dark clouds, precipitated by “China’s ever more draconian laws and Mr Xi’s desire to control cross-border flows of information:”

The space for foreign businesses in China was already being constrained by restrictions that their own governments, led by America’s, have placed on Chinese firms amid geopolitical tensions; more than 9,000 Chinese firms have been hit by Western sanctions, according to Wirescreen, a data provider. Now Mr Xi is shrinking businesses’ room for manoeuvre further. Worse, even cautious movements within the space that remains can invite disaster.

5. Alzheimer’s Anonymous

Writing in The Guardian, a recovering alcoholic shares her caregiving journey with her dad following his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She finds parallels between substance abuse disorder and dementia. With the latter, however, she sees an inexorable unraveling:

For his part, my father was becoming a more difficult patient. Paranoia meant he grew suspicious of things that were designed to help. He would tear off the patches that delivered medication supposed to ease some of his symptoms, and although he was now worryingly shaky on his feet, refused to use the elegant walking stick we got for him. I started to find small, colourful piles of pills nestled between books on the shelves or at the bottom of vases holding flowers that died suspiciously fast (it turns out lilies don’t like donepezil). Though his ability to be rational was lost, these acts of defiance in the face of the inevitable were small ways he could feel the comforting shape of his agency.