Viewing profile — eganp

IIRC, this is still true if you exclude the spike protein and use a higher similarity threshold. Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike more variable as it is s…

This doesn't test the "epigenetic information theory of aging." First, there is no survival analysis. How is the mouse younger if it doesn't live longer? Similarly, the OSK "rejuve…

I'm surprised the insurance will pay for this. The judgment, and actions by Oberlin's administration, strongly suggest they were acting in bad faith. The college's behavior exceed …

$1M in seed funding, but at what valuation? I hope the terms are near market.

Never thought of this distinction before! Thanks for making this distinction. This seems to hold in other contexts. People tend to tolerate price discrimination at an aggregate lev…

Paywall Bypass: https://archive.md/gi57Y

There a quite a few things missing from this paper that would make it a good a good drug discovery paper. First, they didn't discover a drug - they found a hit. 30 days from target…

NIH likely funds 2/3rds of US biomedical research and ~1/3rd of global biomedical research by dollar value [0]. That link lists other big sources (ERC, MRC, US DoD, HHMI). My sense…

Somewhat surprised asymmetric organocatalysis was awarded over asymmetric photocatalysis or photoredox chemistry. Photocatalysis is newer, has more demonstrated use cases, and hold…

The list price will nearly always be a multiple of your cost with insurance. The issue here is that insurers have provisions in their network contracts that prevent providers from …

Some insurers (looking at you United Health Care) have wholly owned PBMs. Thus, the PBM is an asset in its insurance trust. Any profit the PBM makes will appear as in increase in a…

Unfortunately this is pretty accurate. Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are contracted by insurers to set the formulary, in effect the list of drugs the insurer will pay for. They …

I worked with a group trying to get a drug repurposing study running in June of last year. U01 submissions were often Sept-Aug with no cash until April 2021. To a degree, these NOT…

I'm glad we did. Vaccines were a home-run solution. In a crisis, what does academic R+D get you on the margin? Better testing for sure, but that wouldn't solve the crisis like vacc…

This study is looking at the appendix, not any brain tissue. Without considering symptoms, it's possible that altered PrP expression and/or folding in the appendix does not cause v…

Dangerous? The hypothesized connection is not remotely clear. In vitro transformation of human PrP into PrP(Sc) by bovine PrP(Sc) is a necessary for the causal model. The fact that…

Intracranial inoculation of infected tissue is the old-school way to assay for prion activity. Sometimes it takes a few years to get an answer though, especially in cross-species a…

This probably isn't possible as the folding of PrP is not encoded in the mRNA of PRNP. The fold of PrP is a post-translational phenomenon, much like its glycosylation. This is true…

The species barrier in prion transmission appear very strong [0]. Transmitting a prion from a hamster into a mouse often takes multiple passages of direct in brain inoculation. In …

The risk of cow->human BSE transmission is infinitesimal. Species barriers in prions are surprisingly strong and, for practical purposes, nearly impermeable [0]. In fact, the Prion…

Clearly open access has costs, but how does Nature Photonics get to $40k/paper?? Is that how much revenue they expect to derive from the lifetime of the paper?

It's a tough lift to demonstrate that all such modified-mRNA vaccines are safe and likely effective. This trial is a good validation of off-target safety, and that's a huge achieve…

Hey refoundable - great interview! Love Jack's characterization of Alzheimers as chemical roulette. Just wanted to let you know there's a typo in your first figure. "Thalyidamide" …