Don Cherry, Concussions & Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in Hockey, War & Cars
AN OPEN LETTER TO DON CHERRY Hi Don, I’m your neighbour, just a few blocks down from your place. I watched you on CBC ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ the other evening talking about former NHL hockey enforcers complaining about concussions and brain trauma. Imagine that! Don, I like watching you but you seem a bit misguided. I really want to help you. So in order that you be able to make more informed choices before speaking, I am enclosing a bit of information on brain trauma injury and concussions. I love hockey but then I only watch it, haven’t played it since I was a...
Read MoreImagine: Stopping Cell Death – Impact on Medicine
Overview Accelerated cell death or ‘apoptosis’ contributes to about half of all major medical illnesses for which adequate therapy or prevention is currently lacking. This has created an important opportunity for medical science and is creating an emerging multi-billion dollar market. Against this background of a rapidly emerging new market, a number of companies are developing several new drug classes which directly addresses apoptosis either by slowing down the process of cell death (eg. heart attacks, strokes, brain trauma, etc.) or instead, accelerating the rate of cell...
Read MoreKipling & “If”: Inspiration for Life Science Innovation
Besides great summertime reading, I’d say that Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ qualifies him as the poet laureate of life sciences and innovation. Back in the days when King Edward VII ruled the once-mighty British Empire, Kipling’s inspirational poem ‘If’ was published in 1909. ‘If’ proved so exceptional in touching the soul of the British reader that, even in the mid-1990’s, Brits voted ‘If’ as their all-time favourite poem. ‘If’ is inspirational and gives us a clue as to what actual leaders need to do – to inspire one to persevere, sometimes against long...
Read MoreThe Zen of Innovation
Wikipedia defines Zen as “emphasizing experiential wisdom in the attainment of enlightenment…” Sounds a bit deep and cerebral but it really isn’t. It’s actually quite practical. Almost every organization and certainly the vast majority of Biopharma companies would say that they are innovative. But when you speak with many of these companies, they are quick to share stories about just how challenging it is to innovate. Their experiential wisdom seems to be about the attainment of capital to innovate – not innovation itself. Is there a way to rectify this? I recently read...
Read MoreDoes Size Matter…to Pharma?
Many small Biopharma Consultants like us here at Marenon sometimes feel that we are competing against the ‘Big Boys’. I’m not so sure that we are, or even if we should. Consulting businesses with hundreds of areas of practice, thousands of people, tons of resources and huge marketing budgets have a place in the world and that includes the Biopharma world as well. The scale of these organizations is both massive and impressive and is sometimes needed to help even bigger Pharma companies deal with large transnational business issues. For example, many of these big...
Read More