Atelfo writes about biotech and pharmaceutical development, drug economics, and occasionally software engineering culture and LLMs.
HN links it for its biotech writing; the one commenter who mentions it is the author, describing it as a blog mostly about biotech.
RCTs are fine but the obsession with them is overwrought and counterproductive. My own drum to beat on this is regarding clinical trials for fatal diagnoses like cancer: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the-gates-of-oncology-clinical-trials/. We have Kaplan-Meier curves for fatal diagnoses. We know what happens (the tumors grow and metastasize. One doesn't need elaborate phase 3 RCTs to figure out if there's a good shot that a treatment is working; one can see it in tumor response and comparison to known KMCs. The existing system raises costs and causes people to die while waiting a decade or more for exciting treatments: https://atelfo.github.io/2023/12/23/biopharma-from-janssen-to-today.html
Moderna's mRNA-4157 is a current example of this: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-news-for-head-and-neck-cancer-patients-like-me/, although it may be held up by lack of manufacturing capacity as well.
I write about biotech mostly
https://atelfo.github.io/