Blog and Whitepapers
Recon takes an analytical look behind select developments in healthcare
- By Marc Herant
Preempting severe genetic disease
Around 2% of births come with a genetic disease, often with devastating impact. While some appear de novo (either from germplasm dominant mutations or from chromosomal accidents), a fraction are inherited (from the mother if X-linked, from both parents if autosomal recessive) and can be predicted (before conception) by gene sequencing parents. In a fascinating stu…
Keep up with the Recon Strategy Insights
Get an email each time Recon takes an analytical look behind select developments in healthcare.
- By Sarah Dolman
PDF here
Summary
The idea of a single blood-test to detect many cancers is attractive, but is it practical? Can an MCED enhance, or even replace, current screening tests?
This paper delves into these …
- By Marc Herant
How the US taxpayer saved 25M+ people
A short piece celebrating the 20th anniversary of PEPFAR, a program that few outside of the field of Global Health are aware of. The world is not always nasty and…
- By Marc Herant
Preparing for the next pandemic: don’t waste the value of waste
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I got in the habit of checking weekly the Boston sewage report, as a reliable, unbiased way of monitoring …
- By Nikhil Bhojwani
What does Socrates have to do with AI? And what's the Spooky Mountain and why we need to conquer it to get to an AI enabled future?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V10R6lcIl4…
- By Lilian Zhang, Jason Brauner, and Marc Herant
PDF: Trends and strategy in oncology development
Summary
We review a sample of oncology programs from the past decade and arrive at the following key findings:
The use of expansion cohorts in first-i…
- By Marc Herant
Hypertension?!
Antihypertensive drugs are so 80s and 90s (well, except for pulmonary hypertension) to the point that I cannot recall when I last read research in the NEJM about a new blood pressure dr…
- By Jacob Wiesenthal and Sarah Dolman
View the PDF here.
The supply chain of pharmaceuticals consumed in the US has become reliant on foreign sources of drug products and intermediates over the last two decades. Growth of generics and bio…
- By Maggie Pickard and Sarah Dolman
Download a PDF of this article here.
Hematologic cancers account for ~10% of annual new cancer diagnoses and continue to have some of the poorest overall outcomes, particularly for older adults.[1] Ho…
- By Marc Herant
An unusual article on road safety
Motor vehicle accidents are a major share of morbidity and mortality in the young, and as such prevention has long been considered a medically adjacent area (e.g. wit…
- By Marc Herant
A psychedelic for refractory depression
While major depression is awful, treatment-resistant depression (as defined not responding to at least two different courses of therapy) is worse with sufferers…
- By Tory Wolff
Back in 2018, I offered a speculation about what Amazon might do in healthcare as part of its now defunct joint venture with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway. The focus was on doing what Amazon is re…
- By Marc Herant
Is Parkinson’s α-synuclein going to be as elusive a target as β-amyloid has been for Alzheimer’s?
Alpha-synuclein aggregates are characteristic of Parkinson’s disease and genetic variants of this prot…