Priced out

MANY Americans think they pay over the odds for drugs—particularly for cancer drugs. Some go so far as to suggest that other countries free-ride on their largesse, and that Americans are thus subsidising drug development, a situation which, they say, needs to be fixed by changing trade agreements.

A study unveiled at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s meeting in Chicago this week looked into the matter. Daniel Goldstein of the Rabin Medical Centre, in Israel, and his colleagues examined the prices of 15 generic and eight patented cancer drugs in six countries (America, Australia, Britain, China, India and South Africa). They found that the highest prices were, indeed, paid by Americans. The median monthly retail price in the United States was $8,694 for patented drugs like Avastin, Gleevec and Herceptin, and $654 for generic drugs like docetaxel and paclitaxel. Of the countries looked at, India paid the least for its patented drugs ($1,515 a month), and South Africa the least for generics (a tiddly $120).

The story, though, does not end there. Dr Goldstein went on to look at how the prices of these drugs measured…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Hobbit forming

The memory of bones

THE folklores of many places speak of “little people”—human-like but not truly human creatures who live on the edge of humanity’s ken. They seemed mere legends, but in 2003 scientists found some (or, rather, their fossil remains) on Flores, an island in Indonesia. These remains, of individuals just over a metre tall, date from 60,000-100,000 years ago. They were called Homo floresiensis by their finders and “hobbits” by the press, after the fictional hominids invented by J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, some more, older, fossils have turned up.

The latest discoveries, published in this week’s Nature by Gerrit van den Bergh of the University of Wollongong, in Australia, and Yousuke Kaifu of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, go back 700,000 years. Dr van den Bergh and Dr Kaifu have recovered part of a jaw bone (pictured), six isolated adult teeth (five of which are pictured) and two milk teeth from a second site on Flores. One of the adult teeth, they believe, shows that Homo floresiensis descended from <em…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The price of a private phone call

Source: Economist

The personalisation of cancer treatments is leading to better outcomes for patients

THE past five years have seen a torrent of innovation in the treatment of cancer. More than 70 new drugs have come to market, and for some of these describing their consequences as revolutionary is not hyperbole—at least for those patients lucky enough to respond to them. A diagnosis of advanced melanoma, for example, was once tantamount to a death warrant. Median life expectancy after such news was six to nine months. But recently developed “immuno-oncology” drugs, which exploit a patient’s immune system to fight his tumours, are so effective that, in around a fifth of cases, there is real debate among experts as to whether the patient has actually been cured.

“Cure” is not a word much used by oncologists. The best they normally talk of is “remission”. This sort of upbeat news is reinvigorating the study of cancer. And it is not the only thing to do so. As they are showing at this year’s meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), which is taking place in Chicago at the moment, the subject’s practitioners have a spring in their step. Not only do they have new drugs to deploy, they are also developing better ways…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Should I stay or should I go?

AS THE Olympic torch relay nears Rio de Janeiro in the countdown to the games supposed to start there on August 5th, a proposal to postpone or move the event has ignited controversy. An open letter posted online on May 27th and now signed by more than 200 academics and health experts, mostly bioethicists, argues that holding the games as planned is “unethical” because it will speed up the spread of the Zika virus. The reasons the experts put forward, however, do not warrant such drastic action.

Most Zika infections pass with no symptoms. Though the virus can cause a neurological condition that may lead to temporary paralysis or death, this is rare. Zika is at its most dangerous during pregnancy, because it can cause severe brain damage to the unborn baby. Pregnant women are therefore advised to avoid travel to areas where Zika is being transmitted, including Rio de Janeiro.

That is not the letter-writers’ concern, though. They worry that many of the 500,000 foreigners expected to flock to Rio for the games will get infected, and then spread Zika back home. But, though 500,000 is a huge number, it is less than 0.25% of all those who…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Schrödinger’s panda

CHINA seems to swing from insecurity about its science to hubris. In 2015, when Tu Youyou, a pharmacologist, became the first scientist to win a Nobel prize for work carried out in China, the state media’s reaction was not to celebrate her ground-breaking medicinal chemistry. Rather, they claimed that the award was a recognition of traditional Chinese medicine—something she said had little to do with the work that won her the award.

This week Xi Jinping, China’s president, fell into the opposite trap, of overconfidence. Addressing a sea of scientists at a joint meeting in Beijing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the China Association for Science and Technology (see picture above), he repeated his government’s aim that China should become a leading scientific innovator by 2030 and a dominant scientific country by 2049 (a date chosen because it is the 100th anniversary of the communist takeover).

China already spends lavishly on research and development, and publishes reams of scientific papers. Spending on R&D has more than doubled as a share of the economy since 2000, reaching 2.1% of GDP…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Peppered moths

The peppered moth is one of the most famous animals in evolutionary biology. Victorian collections show how a melanic version of this normally speckled species spread through sooty urban areas because its black wings camouflaged resting moths from hungry birds (see picture above). The exact genetic change involved, however, remained elusive. But, in a paper in Nature, Arjen van’t Hof of Liverpool University, in England, and his colleagues, say they have nailed it down. It is a transposable element—a piece of DNA that leaps from place to place in the genome. In this case it has leapt into a gene called cortex, which controls cell division. That promotes cortex’s expression. Just why this makes wings black, though, has yet to be worked out.

Source: Economist

HIV’s slow retrenchment

THE latest dispatch from the war on HIV, the “Global AIDS Update 2016”, just published by UNAIDS, the UN agency responsible for combating the virus, brings qualified good news. Last year, it estimates, there were 1.1m AIDS-related deaths, down from a peak of 2m in 2005 and a figure of 1.2m in 2014. Last year also saw 2.1m new infections, down from a peak of 3.4m in 1998 but up from 2014’s estimate of 2.0m.

By the end of 2015 some 17m people were taking anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs—2m more than the target number for that year, set by the UN in 2011. This accounts for the falling death rate. Some hoped the drug roll-out might also lead to an increased fall-off in the rate of new infections. That hope was based on the idea, experimentally demonstrated at small scale among cohabiting couples, that taking ARVs makes an infected individual less likely to pass the virus on. There is, though, no sign of such an acceleration in the downward trend of new infections. This year’s uptick aside, it has remained fairly steady since the turn of the century, despite the fraction of infected people on ARVs having risen from 3% in 2000 to 46% in…Continue reading
Source: Economist

We want information

ARE black holes bald or hairy? On that strange and esoteric question may hang the future of the universe’s past. The present, the past and the future are all connected by physical laws, a phenomenon called “causal determinism”. With complete information about a system’s present, it ought therefore be possible to determine all its past and future states. In theory, that applies to any system, up to and including the entire universe.

In 1976, however, an up-and-coming Cambridge-based cosmologist called Stephen Hawking challenged this idea by showing that black holes (which are part of the universe, albeit a rather odd part) should evaporate over the course of time, and eventually vanish. That would cause information about anything they had swallowed (and thus a part of the universe’s past) to be lost, meaning the future could not be determined, even in principle. The naive might think this information loss had happened already, as a consequence of the swallowing. But even though it is inside the hole the information continues to exist for as long as the hole does. Causal determinism is not violated.

A black hole’s…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Patched up

I was down by Bondi pier…

SUN cream is a fickle friend. It protects against burn-inducing ultraviolet (UV) light, but only for a period. And the first most people know of when that period is up is the sickening sensation that their skin is starting to catch fire—by which time it is too late to act. But Justin Gooding of the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, now thinks he has a solution for those who might otherwise risk overdoing it on Bondi Beach: a stick-on UV sensor that can be tuned to give warning when a new slap of protection would be advisable.

Dr Gooding’s invention, described in this month’s ACS Sensors, is based on titanium oxide. This is a compound well known to shed high-energy electrons if hit by UV. When those electrons interact with water and molecular oxygen, they generate reactive groups of atoms called free-radicals. Dr Gooding suspected that these radicals could be used to trigger changes in the sorts of dyes employed to colour food.

To test this idea, he and his colleagues filled the cartridges of an inkjet printer with a series of solutions…Continue reading
Source: Economist