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. Like Magic Herbs

“GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel like magic herbs,” writes Scott Alexander in his latest blog. The list of diseases GLP-1s can treat is growing longer – and more eclectic. Alexander reviews the literature and concludes the “magic herb” mania is less myth than reality. Here’s his take on GLP-1s and dementia: 

In chronic inflammation, ie the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time, general bad health damages the body, the immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection, and it provokes a constant low-grade inflammatory response. This is bad, so (if you’re not fighting an infection) anti-inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin is one, ibuprofen is another), but inflammation is a multifaceted process and no one drug can stop it entirely. GLP-1 drugs seem to be especially potent anti-inflammatories that stop some of the inflammatory processes most implicated in dementia.

2. For Sale: Magic Herbs!  

One magic herb begets a hundred others. The GLP-1 frenzy has created a booming market for untested supplements. Some claim to be “nature’s Ozempic.” Others “complement your GLP-1 journey.” None have clinically validated data to demonstrate their efficacy. Wired reports on how the unregulated market is attracting startups and conglomerates alike:

The FDA cannot force supplement-makers to conduct premarket testing to demonstrate that their products contain what they say they contain. The regulatory environment is often described as a wild west. When asked directly, many complementary-supplement purveyors will acknowledge that evidence is limited. “At the present time, controlled human studies on the benefits of supplement support for GLP-1 users are not available,” the Vitamin Shoppe’s Tanzer says.

3. Revolution or Middle School Presentation?

The Nasdaq-100 lost a trillion dollars on July 24. Blame went straight to tech – and the AI fever that swept through the industry. The New Statesman contends that the reality check was fueled by big firms, like pharma, that are failing to find value in using AI. Might the promises of an AI revolution also be a hallucination?

In a survey of 2,500 workers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, published last week, 77 per cent said the generative AI tools they had been asked to use actually added to their workload; nearly half said they had no idea how to produce the productivity gains their employers expected from AI. In a Morgan Stanley investor note, one client, a large pharmaceutical company was reported to have dropped the AI tools it had licensed for 500 workers; an unnamed executive said the slides the software generated looked like “middle-school presentations”.

4. Virtual Rat in a Cage

Does the future of early drug development build on “virtual rodents”? A group of scientists outline the possibility in Nature: 

We built a ‘virtual rodent’, in which an artificial neural network actuates a biomechanically realistic model of the rat in a physics simulator…We found that neural activity in the sensorimotor striatum and motor cortex was better predicted by the virtual rodent’s network activity than by any features of the real rat’s movements…These results demonstrate how physical simulation of biomechanically realistic virtual animals can help interpret the structure of neural activity across behaviour and relate it to theoretical principles of motor control.

5. R-I-P the D-Word

Kudos to Mike Zuendel for landing a piece in Stat News. Mr. Zuendel, who lives with early Alzheimer’s, has launched an initiative to “change the D-word.” As he rightly contends, the issue isn’t semantics, but better care:

The journey toward diagnosis needs to be as easy as possible. And that depends on a shared effort to break down stigma so people can get the support and care they need, find trial opportunities, and approach their next steps feeling empowered and well-informed. Changing how we talk can change how we fight Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment — unleashing earlier diagnosis, better care, and improved lives for people with these conditions.