Juno’s planned suicide is the craziest part of the super crazy Jupiter mission
A crazy Juno mission to Jupiter The Juno space mission to Jupiter is NASA’s most sophisticated project yet. Way more complex than the moon landing or the ISS. The stuff is beyond science fiction. Juno just traveled 5 years and over 1.5 billion miles and entered Jupiter’s orbit at pretty much the exact location where […]
Fresh Biotech grads in India are being set up for an epic fail
One of the things I enjoy most is interacting with recent biotech graduates. I still remember how lost I was when I got out of college. Thrust into an Indian employment market with no biotech industry to speak of. But that was before explosive growth catapulted India’s biotech industry to the $11B it sits at […]
Sharapova’s hilarious explanations for why she doped
Photo by Getty Images So Maria Sharapova is in the news for all the wrong reasons. She came out and admitted that she had tested positive for the drug Meldonium after her quarterfinal match with Serena Williams at the Australian open in January. So the world’s highest paid female athlete took performance enhancing drugs – […]
White middle-aged Americans are drowning in a Pharma industry-created nightmare called opioids
The good Opioids: Seven years back, unable to bear the excruciating pain after a C-section surgery, I pushed the nurse call button on my hospital bed. She came in with a “pain chart”. I just had to choose the severity of my pain on the chart and she would hook me up with a prescription opioid […]
This is my most predictable post update. Ever!
Image: Andrew Burton/Getty Images Earlier this fall, I wrote about Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO and former hedge fund dude Martin Shkreli – master at buying old, unpatented drugs and jacking up their prices overnight. Earlier this month, neo-capitalist demigod was arrested for..you guessed it…fraud! And is currently in the big house. Note – Shkreli was arrested for shenanigans […]
Did you hear about the revolutionary discovery by global drug companies? Tax avoidance!
Last week two of the world’s biggest drug companies came together when Pfizer and Allergan decided to become one. The combined behemoth will replace J&J as the world’s largest drug company. Adjusted for industries, this would roughly equal Apple acquiring Google in technology. Imagine the potential that would unleash as Apple’s hardware gets wedded to […]
A teachable moment in that Zomato guy’s infamous email to his sales team
While browsing the news this morning, I ran into an email that Deepinder Goyal – chief at zomato.com – wrote to his sales team recently. Zomato -which offers an array of value added restaurant services – is one of the shining jewels of India’s nascent start-up boom, with a current reported valuation over $1B. […]
Want to increase your chances of start-up success? Lack focus.
I recently had an industry watcher tell me that the key ingredient to a start-up’s success is focus. You need to be focused like a laser on your product, objectives, financial plan and execute without distractions, he said. Apparently this is especially true for life sciences start-ups. I could not disagree more. Great scientists make […]
How one start-up caused a 4% drop in biotech stocks in a single day.
Lost in the recent Volkswagen mayhem is the carnage in Biotech based holdings. The iShares NASDAQ biotech index is down about 5% in the last week or so- much of it in a single day. Even crazier is the reason behind this precipitous fall. A little known anti-parasitic drug called Daraprim is used to treat very rare […]
The (tragically) curious case of statins – the miracle drug
Everybody wins with Statins. Hello. Pleasant day to you. Statistically, you will most likely die from heart disease. Sorry to be blunt, but cardio-vascular illness is the number one cause of worldwide deaths by far (way higher than all forms of cancer COMBINED). The bleak statistics on the devastation can be found here. But, hey! […]