By Jonathan D. Rockoff
Pfizer’s huge R&D shop is even bigger now that the company has swallowed Wyeth. To get a sense of the changes that could be in store, the Health Blog spoke today with the company’s two top R&D execs — Martin Mackay, a Pfizer veteran who will lead small-molecule work, and Mikael Dolsten, a former Wyeth executive who will oversee vaccines and biotech drugs.
Following a popular trend in the … Continue Reading
By Jacob Goldstein
Catch cancers early and treat them before they become deadly. That’s the idea behind cancer screening, and that’s clearly how it works with pap smears for cervical cancer and colonoscopy for colon cancer.
But in some cases screening can lead to aggressive treatment of slow-growing tumors that would never have caused a problem if left alone — and the treatment itself can carry serious side … Continue Reading
By Jacob Goldstein
The oft-cited WHO ranking that said the U.S. has the 37th best health-care system in the world is dated and had problems even when it was new, WSJ stats maven Carl Bialik writes in his column today.
The ranking was published in 2000, and came up against a major problem: Good data weren’t available from many countries. So researchers used other measures, such as literacy rates and income inequality, to … Continue Reading
By Jacob Goldstein
A closer look at the HIV vaccine study results announced recently suggests the vaccine may be less impressive than originally suggested, the WSJ reports.
Researchers said last month that the vaccine lowered the risk of infection by about 31% — a “modest benefit,” they said, but one that was statistically significant, suggesting the finding was not a fluke. Another slice of the data that was … Continue Reading