Chemist turned neuroscientist. @MGHMartinos @MGHImaging. Editor-in-chief of @ACSChemNeurosci.
Boston, MA
Joined November 2013
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Next week: I’ll be joining a great panel on "Accelerating Drug Discovery" at @LongwoodLeaders Boston CEO meeting, November 2-3.
Looking forward to exploring new ideas and sharing experience with @aris_baras , Szabolcs Nagy @turbine_ai , Phil Vickers @Solu_Tx , and Kara Carter!
"The number one Google rule is that you start with user experience. We've never done that."
@thomasinselmd walked into his first product meeting at Google having no idea what UX meant. The team, he told me, looked at him like he was absolutely an idiot.
Tom's experience suggests there is a cocreation gap in mental health: mental health professionals, caregivers, and others in the health care system failing to fundamentally design solutions around patients, despite their best intentions.
"Until you can change payment, you don't change adoption in the healthcare system. What gets paid for is what gets done."
@thomasinselmd spent 13 years running NIMH. Then he watched from the outside as every innovation he'd hoped to see achieve impact stall out at the same choke point: not the science, not the clinical evidence, not even the will. The payment model.
This is one of the most compelling things he said in our whole conversation. If you want to understand why good treatments stay on the shelf, start here.
Full conversation at Aether in Mind: aetherinmind.substack.com/p/…
A parent, watching his son cycle through hospitalizations, incarceration, homelessness, said this to Thomas Insel MD at what was supposed to be an inspiring presentation about NIMH science. Tom told me the story himself, and how it changed him.
Has the field been shooting for the wrong endpoints, acute symptom relief instead of real recovery? The fire burns while we struggle to find out.
Full conversation at Aether in Mind aetherinmind.substack.com/p/…
"Our house is on fire, and you're talking to us about the chemistry of the paint."
An arresting line, putting the mental health treatment challenge in very direct terms.
All you drug hunters out there, are you optimistic about this?
While I absolutely agree that we can and should go faster in clinical trials, I'm not sure we can get through all three phases of development in four years.
Simulation and seamless designs can cut the dead time between trials, but they can’t speed up the biology. For slowly progressing diseases, the real gains will come from better biomarkers and endpoints that show us sooner whether a drug is working.
Have you seen this new @ARPA_H program? SURPASS: Simulation-augmented, Real-time Platform Adaptive Seamless Trials
The premise on the website is, "What if we could shorten clinical trials from taking more than a decade to less than four years?"
Can it be done?
"I think industry has basically given up on psychiatry except for appropriately exploiting serendipitous discoveries. If you were to do a clinical trial with drugs that turned out to be effective, you dont see an effect and the FDA says no dice…
They weren't outliers. They had a different disease. Psychiatry cant get there yet because it hasn't found its biomarkers.