Forbes reported that Astra Zeneca sponsored a drug trial where their lipid-lowering drug, Crestor, went head-to-head with Pfizer’s Lipitor, a strange battle from the start since many considered Lipitor the underdog in the battle. But the results showed no difference in outcome, which for this study was how blockages in the arteries of the heart progressed after treatment.
In other words, the trial resulted in a draw, and delivered a huge blow to Crestor, since it will retain its patent, and associated high price tag, until 2016, while Lipitor’s constituant, atorvastatin, will be available as a generic this week at a fraction of the price of the brand-name cholesterol-lowering meds (http://ti.me/tZf3j6).

This story was intriguing in many ways. First, I think it’s great that the researchers published the results of the study, which Astra Zeneca funded, in the New England Journal of Medicine. It would have no doubt been much easier to sweep these results under the carpet, where they’d join the other dark data of failed clinical trials (http://bit.ly/tn7dBr).

Second, I think it’s important to set a precedence that drugs intended to treat the same condition go head-to-head in properly designed clinical trials. As consumers and patients, we deserve to know how each treatment measures up.

So kudos to Astra Zeneca for taking the high road. The results of the trial will cost the company money in terms of decreased sales. But they made infinite strides in forging a transparent relationship with their customers.

**

Photo via Flickr / Grumpy-Puddin

The small, red berries of the _Richadella dulcifica_ plant are not very sweet. In fact, miraculin, the main chemical found in the berry’s flesh tastes like, well, nothing. But after eating these berries, people’s taste buds embark on an hour-long wild ride, so that any sour foods they eat — even lemons — will taste sweeter than candy. Quite trippy.

A new paper published in PNAS describes how this process works: miraculin binds to receptors in the tongue, partially blocking the taste buds that identify sweet foods under normal conditions. But if something acidic, like the juice from a sour lemon, interacts with miraculin, the molecule shape-shifts, and suddenly, the sweet taste receptors are kicked into high gear. Although the same lemons would taste sour to anyone else, miraculin makes them taste sweet.

As interesting as the finding may be, the backstory is even better.

In the 1960s, biomedical scientist Robert Harvey first reported these miracle berries, as they’re called, which locals in west Africa had eaten for centuries. Quickly realizing the potential these fruits might have for making bad-tasting, good-for-you foods more palatable, as well as the role this type of artificial sweetener might play on diseases like diabetes, Harvey organized a new venture, the Miralin Company, to bring the additive to market, complete with the financial backing of heavy-hitter investors like Reynolds Metals, Barclays and Prudential.

Initial talks with the FDA went well, Harvey reported. But the night before the company’s launch in 1974, the FDA got cold feet. The food was an additive, the government agency now decried, and in order to sell their product, Harvey would have to run the miracle berries through many more years of expensive testing. The new directives proved too extensive for the fledgling company to bear.

But as Harvey prepared to shelve his idea, he realized he was not the only one watching Miralin’s door’s close. As he told the BBC:

A few weeks later, things turned sour. A car was spotted driving back and forwards past Miralin’s offices, slowing down as someone took photographs of the building. Then, late one night, Harvey was followed as he drove home.
“I sped up, then he sped up. I pulled into this dirt access road and turned off my lights and the other car went past the end of the road at a very high speed. Clearly I was being monitored.
I honestly believe that we were done in by some industrial interest that did not want to see us survive because we were a threat. Somebody influenced somebody in the FDA to cause the regulatory action that was taken against us.

Whether Harvey was in fact being tailed by Big Sugar, or just a disgruntled ex-lab mate — who knows. But I’m willing to bet the farm that these new findings have tickled the sweet tooth of a commercial entity somewhere out there, in one way or another.

Photo via Flickr / adaduitokla

Even if you only got a whiff of the product demo sessions at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week, you noticed: sensors are getting smaller, cheaper, and more closely integrated into tools we already use.

Consider Pulse Sensor, a dime-sized device that uses a beam of light to measure a person’s heartbeat. For $25, customers get a sensor kit that plugs directly into an Arduino microcontroller, the staple device of any DIY hardware hacker. Attach the sensor to an earlobe or fingertip and the light beam measures changes in tissue volume to gauge a person’s pulse. To date, the company has already raised over $18,000 on Kickstarter.

The other demo that caught my eye was the Google+ health challenge app from a group at CTIS, the winners of the Body Media challenge. Through their armband devices, Body Media uses a number of sensors to figure out how much someone moves and sweats during activity, giving an accurate read on how much energy is burned during the day. (I reviewed this product for Wired magazine back in June 2010). To win the challenge, CTIS built an extension to the Google+ platform that allowed users to create custom health challenges between a group of friends or colleagues, such as competitions to see who loses the most weight over 30 days, or who bikes the most miles in a week.

The idea of creating online health challenges isn’t new. But really, who needs to visit *another* website to track their health challenges? As we’re seeing with news, shopping, and entertainment, people want their online experience streamlined. The fact CTIS built their app into another social platform is key. Zynga has more or less cornered the Facebook game market; I’m waiting to see who will step to the plate with health apps.

Photo via Flickr / Magnet 4 Marketing dot Net

People use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites as channels for self-expression. But whether updating or uploading, people are telling their social stories with only two tools: text and images.

But what if social media wasn’t confined to words and pictures, but instead, allowed users to uploaded graphs or tables? In other words, could data, pure data, become a token in our social currency?

That’s the thought contributed during a panel session at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco by Gary Wolf, contributing editor at Wired, and an organizer of Quantified Self, a community whose users meticulously track certain aspects of their lives, some down to infinitesimal levels, such as how they spend every minute of the day (no joke).

Wolf’s comment followed a presentation by Stead Burwell, the CEO of Alliance Health Networks, who demoed Diabetic Connect an information and community site for patients battling diabetes. Alliance spent a great deal of time (read: money) on creating user profiles that would allow visitors of the site to connect with their peers, patients who share similar experiences. But that connection, they found, was key. As Burwell said in his presentation, users not only like to receive badges and virtual rewards, they like to hand them out as well.

Noting how willingly people update their status on social media sites like Facebook, sometimes with unrestrained detail, Burwell wondered how to bottle this social energy to get patients to openly share personal health data.

In my opinion, the limitations aren’t technical. After all there is nothing preventing users on Facebook from uploading a JPEG charting the number of miles they ran in a given month. Sure, social media sites could make tools available to users to facilitate the process, but that’s the easy part – there are already a number of product-related sites, such as Nike+, that do just this. The shift that Wolf describes, and that Burwell hopes for, is more philosophical, a change in the type of information we feel comfortable sharing with our friends, families, and colleagues.

So here’s my request: If you track any aspect of your life, whether your weekly running mileage, calories consumed by food, weight fluctuations, or daily blood glucose readings, share your data with your social network. Let’s see what happens.

Photo via Flickr / Sean MacEntee

The idea that climate change is linked to the spread of a disease is not new. Some bacteria and viruses, after all, piggyback on an animal or insect, and the infectious advance depends on the host’s reaction to climbing temperatures. Consider dengue, a disease once anchored to tropical climates by its host’s penchant for heat and humidity, which is now pushing further north with its mosquito transits as the upper latitudes get warmer. But according to a study published this past June in PNAS, it’s not only climbing temperatures that are worrisome; in the past, even heavy rains have altered the course of disease, though often in divergent directions.

During the third plague pandemic (China, 1850-1964), researchers found that, for better or worse, the seasonal rains were a strong predictor of how the disease spread. There, storms governed Pestilence’s toll, prodding the disease in the arid north, and quelling it in the humid south.

Rats are the primary host for the bubonic plague, and in general, the more that infected rats move, the more the disease will spread. In the dry north, they figure, the rains quenched the parched landscape, causing the rats, and the disease, to stir. In the southern part of the country, the rains only served to make the humidity worse, perhaps forcing the rats to sit tight.

Keeping tabs on the spread of infectious disease is one thing; understanding the interaction of pathogens, hosts, and behavior is yet another.

Photo via Flickr / Yorick_R

The brilliance of Wikipedia is that anyone, at any time, can contribute to the project, and in doing so, the collective knowledge of the world’s largest encyclopedia keeps improving and expanding. In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins brought up an interesting point about Wikipedia worth sharing; one that anyone interested in dealing with virtual communities should absorb.

To put it simply: in the burgeoning world of virtual communities, there is still a good reason to bring people together in real life. In the course of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon in June, with a group of its curators and 20+ Wikipedia volunteer contributors, the British Library was able to update over 30 of the online encyclopedia’s topics tied to collections housed within its walls. Something tells me this would have been difficult to do with a scattered online group.

I think this example also shows how an organization can harness and direct crowdsourced work in a way that’s a win for both sides. Here, the British Library staff was able to get the content that mattered to the organization updated in Wikipedia for free. And the volunteers? Rather than feeling like they were being exploited, they were empowered by their own sense of accomplishment, and powerfully rewarded by the recognition they received from the library curators and their peers. (And I guess getting mentioned in The New Yorker doesn’t hurt either.)

*Side note: This wasn’t a central theme of the story, but Collins also points out a site called Wikipedia Vision, where visitors get a real-time snapshot of what’s being edited at Wikipedia, and by whom. Text bubbles briefly superimpose on the site’s world map, showing the location of the editor, and what they’re working on. Even people who monitor traffic on websites with analytics tools like ChartBeat, like I do at PLoS Blogs, will appreciate Wikipedia Vision’s slick interface and open nature.

Photo via Flickr / nojhan

Read the post here.

Read the post here.

GOOD has an interesting infographic on deadly disease outbreaks throughout history. Though measles and smallpox are the most prolific microscopic assassins, claiming over 500 million lives, these diseases have been around forever — measles since the 7th century BC, smallpox since 10,000 BC.

What’s more surprising to me is that the Spanish Flu killed up to 100 million people in just over a year’s time as the 1918 flu epidemic spread.

Read the post on GOOD here.

About a year ago, right after The Decision Tree book came out, I realized that a concept I touched on in the book had far larger potential. The Feedback Loop, it struck me, had potential as a framework for improving human behavior throughout our lives. Indeed, feedback loops could be put into action beyond health, into areas such as productivity, energy consumption, and other categories where human behavior plays a pivotal role.

So it only took me 15 months, then, to tap out the article that is now the cover story in the new issue of WIRED: The Feedback Loop: How To Get Better At Anything.

This is a classic tech/trend piece, but one that I’m especially proud of, because I think it represents some thinking that goes way beyond my meager brain. It is, as much as anything I’ve ever written, very much in the zeitgeist in Silicon Valley. The idea is simple: Tracking our behavior can help us improve it. (This is the essence of the Quantified Self meetups that my pals Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly have curated). But the opportunity today is profound: New sensors can help us track our behavior more readily than ever before – and, moreover, that tracking can extend beyond the Silicon Valley crowd to the population at large. Feedback loops can be incorporated into all sorts of experiences and tools, and can be readily understood by all sorts of people. Thus, all of a sudden, a rather geeky idea starts to get rather universal. And that means SCALE, and that’s where it starts to get interesting.

One thing I was sorry about in the Wired story was that I couldn’t give full voice to the vast historical and contemporary context of feedback loops, exploring their roots in 18th century engineering and 20th century military strategy and contemporary philosophy and behavioral science. There is a HUGE amount to talk about in terms of feedback loops – where they come from, what they draw on, what they help us with today, and what they might enable tomorrow.

In other words, there’s a lot more to say here. It’s almost like there’s another book in it….