Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Of Mice or Men?

News flash: investors are punch-drunk on the lucrative potential of technology to transform healthcare. This time, it’s a drug discovered by artificial intelligence from Verge Genomics. BlackRock and big pharma have teamed up on the AI investment. Verge CEO explainswhy, this time, it might be different:

“Hypotheses [for therapies] are usually sourced from academic discoveries or publications and tested in a sequential way, mostly in animals, mice or even cell models to predict which of these drugs would actually work in humans. Hundreds of millions of dollars later you are entering clinical trials and, unsurprisingly, the drug fails,” said Zhang. “We are saying why not start in humans from day one, using a data driven approach if we want to succeed in humans?”

2. Text Me

Behold the power of gee-whiz technologies like AI – and the lowly text message. A recent pilot study at the University of Pennsylvania finds that a simple SMS can reduce hospital readmissions:

After patients were discharged from a hospital following emergency care, researchers saw a significant decrease in hospital readmission among patients who received automated check-in text messages from their primary care team. Specifically, the researchers found a 55 percent decline in the likelihood that these patients would need to stay at the hospital again in the next month, and a 41 percent reduction in the odds that they would need emergency care of any kind over the next 30 days.

3. Mind Craft

Kids who play video games may be more – not less! – skilled at impulse control and working memory. Only recently was a video game approved by the FDA for kids with ADHD. Now, a research teams uncovers the “cognitive benefits” of gaming:

Functional MRI brain imaging analyses found that children who played video games for three or more hours per day showed higher brain activity in regions of the brain associated with attention and memory than did those who never played. At the same time, those children who played at least three hours of video games per day showed more brain activity in frontal brain regions that are associated with more cognitively demanding tasks and less brain activity in brain regions related to vision.

4. Pharma Re-Org: Merge GA and Medical

Medical knows the science. Government Affairs knows the policy. But, why, never the two shall meet? A burgeoning trend in tech policy, and embraced by a new center at Georgetown University, suggests why the wonks and the lab coats should join forces. The founder of the Georgetown program makes the case in Nature:

I’ve seen what researchers trained as policy analysts can contribute. Consider the US CHIPS and Science Act, signed this August, which will infuse billions of dollars into semiconductor research and manufacturing. Vulnerabilities in the technology and supply chain in this industry were uncovered decades ago. It took connecting the issue with national and economic security to spark action. A few policy analysts…contributed to this perspective shift with a series of actionable reportsand the willingness to do the work to implement them.

5. Faster, Cheaper, Safer Medical Devices

How does the pipe dream become reality? Economist Parker Rogers makes a simple argument: the FDA needs to deregulate or “down-classify” medical devices to less onerous review categories. His evidence provides strong support for his claims:

Deregulation events significantly increase the quantity and quality of new technologies in affected medical device types relative to control groups…These events increase firm entry and lower the prices of medical procedures that use affected medical device types…the rates of serious injuries and deaths attributable to defective devices do not increase measurably after these events. Perhaps counterintuitively, deregulating certain device types lowers adverse event rates significantly, consistent with firms increasing their emphasis on product safety as deregulation exposes them to more litigation.