Sy Mukherjee
Fortune
New York, NY, United States
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Recent articles by Sy:
Brainstorm Health: Tech and the Measles Outbreak, Cell Therapy Coverage, Hospital Readmission
Happy Friday, readers. An ongoing measles outbreak in the Pacific Northwest and beyond is now putting pressure on some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players, including Facebook and Google, to take action to debunk false information and conspiracy theories regarding vaccines. California Rep. Adam Schiff on Thursday sent letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: J&J Auris Acquisition, Traditional Health Care, Medicare Buy In
Hello, readers. Millennials, and their even scarier, younger counterparts, Generation Z, have continued their killing streak. The victim, this time, is primary care and perhaps the entirety of the traditional health care system itself, according to a new Accenture digital health consumer survey. (I would just like to go on the record and confess that I am, myself, a millennial. Please don’t… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: J&J Depression Nasal Spray, Gilead Stock, Anti-Vaxxers
Hello, readers. Drug giant Johnson & Johnson enjoyed a 1.6% stock boost on Tuesday after a crucial Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee vote recommending approval of its intriguing, if controversial, depression treatment esketamine. The FDA isn’t required to follow the expert panel’s recommendations – but it usually does, especially when the votes are as lopsided as they… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Supplements Crackdown, Praluent Price Slash, Ebola Outbreak
Happy Monday, readers. I hope you enjoyed your weekend. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to battle what has, for decades, been one of the less-regulated mass consumer industries in America: Dietary supplements. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a pair of press releases on Monday that suggest an upcoming overhaul of the supplements industry, which has often gotten away… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Sangamo Stock, FDA Walgreens Warning, DNA Malware
Greetings, readers. Gene therapy and gene editing have taken the life sciences by storm in the past few years. We’ve seen the approvals of treatments that re-engineer patients’ cells to fight cancer and shocking claims of gene-edited babies abroad; dozens of biotechs continue to experiment with technologies such as CRISPR and “gene silencing,” techniques which could (theoretically) curb a… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: State of the Union Promises, CRISPR IP, Sanofi Approval
Good afternoon and happy hump day, readers. President Trump delivered his second formal State of the Union address to Congress last night (you can read a transcript of the whole thing here). As expected, health care made some pretty prominent appearances. We previewed some of the topics the president would likely tackle yesterday, including an ambitious moonshot meant to eradicate HIV in the… → Read More
The State of the Health Care Union
Donald Trump's 2019 State of the Union is coming up tonight. Here's what he may say about healthcare, HIV, and drug prices. → Read More
Brainstorm Health: State of the Union, GSK Deal, Verily Smart Shoe
Good afternoon, readers. President Donald Trump is slated to deliver the State of the Union address this evening at 9 PM Eastern time. The contents are anyone’s guess, although the White House has attempted to preface the speech by saying it will contain “a policy agenda both parties can rally behind.” Hot button issues such as immigration, trade, and the economy at large are likely to serve as… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Ultrasound Drug Delivery, Netflix and Goop, Alkermes Rejection
Happy Monday, readers. Advances in medical technology oft rely, not only on new medicines themselves, but new ways to deliver ones that actually exist. Think of it as an extended form of product lifecycle management—making existing mousetraps even better. My colleague Renae Reints has an interesting dispatch along those lines about a company called Suono Bio, which is attempting to use low… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Brexit Stockpile, Novartis Cell Therapy, San Francisco Soda Health Warnings
Happy Friday, readers! Elections – and referenda – have consequences. And the UK may soon be grappling with some dire ones for public health if lawmakers are unable to reach a deal on Brexit. The specter of a so-called “hard Brexit” has already raised fears about intense disruptions to food and drug supply chains, leading some to even stockpile medications, as Reuters reports. The vast majority… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: New Drug Pricing Proposal, Heart Disease, Digital Health Popularity
Good afternoon, readers. A bit of breaking news going into the evening—some that could, theoretically, have significant consequences for the pharmaceutical industry if implemented. The Trump administration on Thursday officially recommended major changes to how insurers and pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) interact when it comes to drug rebates for Medicare. OK, in plainer English: A proposed… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Big Pharma Price Increases, Apple Aetna Health App, Medicare for All
Hello, readers. With another presidential election cycle already upon us (brace yourselves), drug pricing is going to be a front and center issue yet again. And big pharma companies appear to be acknowledging both that reality, and the deeper wake-up call, that increasing list prices ad nauseum isn’t exactly a winning business strategy over the long term. As we’ve reported on numerous occasions,… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: HIV Data Leak, Global Syndemic, Insys Founder Trial
Good afternoon, readers. One of this year’s biggest health data breaches was reportedly linked to an American citizen—and didn’t even occur in this country, according to Bloomberg. More than 14,000 people with HIV, and 2,400 of their contacts, were reportedly “illegally disclosed online” in Singapore as part of a cyber attack the health ministry says was perpetrated by U.S. citizen Mikhy Farrera… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: WHO on Cancer Drug Prices, Growing Uninsurance Rate, Migraine Drug Wars
Happy Friday, readers. Policy – legislative, administrative, and otherwise – has consequences. The ongoing saga of the partial federal government shutdown is proof positive of that (a reported deal released late Friday afternoon may re-open the government, but for just three weeks, by the way). Policy changes also have a way of building up over time. And recent changes to the Affordable Care Act… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: New Genentech CEO, IBM Blockchain Initiative, Profiting Off Climate Change,
Good afternoon, readers. Blockchain, that digital ledger technology that we all kind-of understand (I kid—all you need to understand it is to follow my colleagues at Fortune‘s fin tech publication The Ledger), could theoretically hold a lot of promise in the medical space. U.S. health care is so staggeringly disparate and disconnected that such a decentralized record-keeping tool makes intuitive… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Optum Amazon-JPM-Berkshire Lawsuit, Alcohol Epidemic, Vertex COO Ouster
Hello and happy hump day, readers. Your friendly neighborhood newsletter author has, unfortunately, fallen prey to that most prolific of winter maladies – the common cold. So it’ll have to be a short one for today. But I did want to highlight what’s been a somewhat under-the-radar public health story. Addiction to deadly drugs such as opioids (illicit or otherwise) has, understandably, soaked up… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Editas CEO Departure, J&J Settlement, Smart Toilet
Happy Tuesday, readers! I hope you had a wonderful long weekend. Publicly traded CRISPR gene editing-focused companies had a rough return to the markets this week on a pair of bearish news bits: The sudden departure of Editas Medicine CEO Katrine Bosley and a pessimistic report on another company, Crispr Therapeutics, from Citi analyst Yigal Nochomovitz, regarding the timeline of its early-stage… → Read More
Brainstorm Health: New Alzheimer's Theory, Walmart and CVS, Novartis Big Data Project
Happy Friday, readers! As we head into MLK weekend, I wanted to highlight an absolute must-read feature in the latest Fortune magazine issue: Rick Tetzeli’s fascinating foray into Paul Cox’s radical new theory for tackling Alzheimer’s disease. It’s no secret that Alzheimer’s drug development has been rife with failure for more than 15 years (my own mini-summary of that debacle also appears in… → Read More
Alzheimer’s: A Trail of Disappointment for Big Pharma
Once-promising drugs have failed at a daunting rate. → Read More
Brainstorm Health: Apple Watch and J&J, Ideal Diet, FDA Diabetes Vote
Hello, readers. The specter of Big Tech’s entry into the health care space has certainly elicited plenty of ink, deserved or otherwise. In recent months, it seems like Amazon has sucked up a large part of the conversation (understandable, given the PillPack acquisition that moved it definitively, if somewhat obliquely, into the pharmaceutical space). But the latest Apple announcement appears to… → Read More