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. Artificial Listening

Silicon Valley claims that AI can solve, well, everything. Now, the Davos set sees AI as a solution to persistent shortages in mental health care:

Many consumers are willing to try AI to manage their mental health. In fact, 32% of respondents to the Oliver Wyman Forum survey said they would be interested in using AI instead of a person. At the high end, 51% of respondents from India expressed a willingness to use AI-generated therapy, compared to 24% in the US and France. Interest in receiving support from a human-like therapist to manage mental health is highest in countries with fewer mental health professionals per capita, demonstrating how AI can extend access, especially in developing markets.

2. Powerless Point

When was the last time you found a colleague’s PPT presentation thrilling? The bore-fest isn’t unique to pharma. According to 1843, the Air Force worried that death-by-deck might lead to death-in-combat. In response, they’re subbing out slide decks for “speculative fiction” about future scenarios. 

For the past six years, Blue Horizons has invited Peter Singer and August Cole, founders of a company called Useful Fiction, to turn air-force officers into sci-fi authors. Singer and Cole think that decision-makers are more likely to sit up and listen if future threats, and the methods to combat them, are presented in a gripping story rather than in a plodding report: “We sneak fruit and veggies into a smoothie,” was how Singer described it.

Might the approach work for colleagues presenting clinical endpoints or KOL engagement priorities?

3.  A New Public Health Emergency: Subtlety 

Why is trust in public health low and declining? Economist and author Emily Oster thinks the problem is rooted in the way health officials make their claims: 

Public health agencies typically tell people what to do and what not to do, but they don’t regularly explain why — or why people might hear something different from others. They also often fail to prioritize. In the end, advice for a range of topics is delivered with the same level of confidence and, seemingly, the same level of urgency. The problem is that when people find one piece of guidance is overstated, they may begin to distrust everything.

4. TB’s Unwanted Crown

Tuberculosis is, once again, the world’s deadliest infectious disease. There are competing ideas for why TB regained the unwanted crown: 

“Disruptions to TB programs during the height of the pandemic led to more people going undiagnosed and untreated for TB. [And] guidance to shelter in place may have also limited the spread of TB,” says Yogan Pillay, who heads efforts to improve TB program delivery at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Most of the reasons the infection persists are frustratingly well-known, says Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership. There's too little money for research, treatment, and patient care needs. And there's stigma that can keep the most common victims of TB, impoverished people including migrants and sex workers, from seeking help or being offered treatment.

This long-form article from Asimov Press offers an excellent history on the history and future of TB treatment. 

5. Sugar High

If TB is back, diabetes has arrived. A new study in The Lancet details how, all over the world – in high- and low-income countries alike – diabetes is raging. The FT reports: 

Even wealthy countries faced pressures keeping up with the “relentless condition”, said Helen Kirrane, head of policy and campaigns at charity Diabetes UK. “This research shows we’re facing a global diabetes crisis,” she said. “It should be a major concern to policymakers in the UK, where diagnoses of diabetes have doubled to 4.4mn in less than two decades.”