When the pandemic came, the biopharmaceutical sector was ready: It stepped up and produced ventilators, diagnostic tests, vaccines and treatment – all in record time. And this teaches us a lesson for the future: Society needs to invest in innovation. We need to make sure that we create an environment where human ingenuity is liberated and has all the resources it needs to advance science for the benefit of society.
Albert Bourla, DVM, PhD Chairman and CEO, Pfizer
The rate-limiting step in the past has been the ability to culture a virus and get it to grow in yields needed to provide enough vaccine. With mRNA technology, it’s sort of plug and play. If you come up with a different mRNA construct, you can put it into the existing manufacturing processes and have a reasonable degree of assuredness that you will get the same yields and the same output.
Scott Gottlieb, MD Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute and 23rd Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
MIND, BODY & SOUL Part II: Innovations in Prevention and Treatment
Michael E. Farkouh, MD Peter Munk Chair in Multinational Clinical Trials; Director, Heart & Stroke/Richard Lewar Centre of Excellence; Vice-Chair, Research and Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto Patients at high risk for cardiovascular disease, based on age, sex, history of smoking, signs of inflammation and obesity are at an increased risk for incident cancer. Folks with cancers are more likely to be at high risk for cardiovascular disease, suggesting commonality between the two diseases.
Laurie H. Glimcher, MD President and CEO, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Director, Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center We would all love to have a world where we can vaccinate our children against cancer. We’re a ways off from that, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to have our kids go to the doctor, get their vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella – and then they get their cancer vaccines as well?
Ron Winslow Freelance Medical and Science Writer; Former Wall Street Journal Medical Correspondent The convergence of information technology and life sciences will change the future of medicine. We have the development of artificial intelligence, genetic sequencing, computational biology and remarkable advances in microscopy that are being used to unearth new insights and discoveries about our biology and how our biology works, how it doesn’t work and how we might better and more efficiently address strategies to make it work better and make us healthier.
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