The biomedical community has a lot to be excited about as the “cure” for cancer gets closer than ever. It may now be in sight, with just a bit more testing, fine tuning, and approvals required. The new treatments are achieving cure rates above 80%, and achieving it with patients who have not responded to more traditional treatments, like…click for full article.

Services are growing at a decent pace, though more slowly than a year ago. The labor market is the strongest in years, so consumer spending is growing at a good pace, including retail sales, driven by red-hot ecommerce sales. Where the economy is in trouble is in industrial goods and in the huge oil-and-gas sector which also drags down the manufacturing segments that supply it with heavy equipment, tech equipment, vehicles, chemicals, and the like. And I have a couple of special thoughts on the consumer side, concerning apparel sales.

We’ll look at this situation via the detailed wholesale trade report by the Census Bureau, released today. Total wholesales in October fell 1.4% from October last year, to $494.3 billion, below where they’d first been in May 2018. It was the sixth month in a row of year-over year declines and the largest such decline since 2016, and it follows the boom last year when year-over-year sales growth peaked in May at nearly 11%…CLICK for complete article

The idea behind gene and cell therapy is to introduce organic material into a body that needs help. Bone marrow transplants, also known as stem cell transplants, infuse either your own stem cells (autologous) or someone else’s stem cells (allogeneic) into your body. This is done when your bone marrow no longer produces healthy blood cells, often a result of cancer treatments (chemotherapy). Stem cell infusion enables the body to once again produce healthy blood cells.

Stem cell therapy is well established in mainstream medicine. However, gene therapy has lagged behind, as the research is difficult, and one infamous human test failed badly, ending in the death of the patient. The idea with gene therapy is to introduce a healthy gene into the body, replacing all of the unhealthy genes, such as the gene that causes Cystic Fibrosis. The idea is sound in that we can now positively identify problem genes and we can identify and isolate good genes to replace them with. The really difficult part is finding a safe and effective way to…Click to read full article.