bedris

I'd like to see these data normalized against parental income, education level, etc. My hypothesis is that there wouldn't be much difference in academic performance for homeschooled vs. non-homeschooled students. In other words, my guess is that having parents with some financial means who place on emphasis on education is what drives academic performance, not whether the child spends their day in a classroom or their house.

46 is also the average age for a first-time Porsche buyer.

Those photographs are stunning – and haunting. Thanks for sharing them.

Exactly. Take entrepreneurship: the founder is rewarded financially if he/she succeeds but is punished financially if he/she fails. The banks, on the other hand, were rewarded financially when they made money for their clients (in the form of performance bonuses), but were bailed out when they failed to carry out their job successfully. This asymmetry is antithetical to capitalism.

I like how Nassim Taleb put it: "the incentive system put in place by financial companies has produced the worst possible economic system mankind can imagine: capitalism for the profits and socialism for the losses."

This article is biotech-specific, but I'd be curious to know more about how the venture debt landscape looks for tech startups.

Correct. This tumor-mediated disorganization of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is what enables cytotoxic drugs to reach larger cancerous brain lesions, which explains why these growths often show a clinical response. Under normal circumstances, many cytotoxic drugs cannot cross the BBB.

I think that all of your questions come down to two core concepts: therapeutic index and antigen stability.

For therapeutic index, you want to identify and target antigens that show the largest difference between cancerous tissues and normal tissues (i.e., antigens with a large therapeutic index). In other words, you'd want your drug to bind to an antigen that's present at a higher level on the prostate cancer cells than the normal prostate cells, such that the normal cells are spared.

For antigen stability, you ideally want your drug to target an antigen whose expression is maintained in metastatic lesions. In other words, if a cancer metastasizes from a primary site to a distant organ, and the antigen your drug targets is maintained on the cancerous cells that have made their way to the distant site, then that is a more therapeutically amenable target then one whose expression is lost upon tumor metastasis.

Do those explanations answer your questions well? Let me know if you'd like me to clarify more.