Catherine Arnst is in charge of content development for Edelman’s national health media team. She is helping to further the agency’s efforts to produce creative written, video and audio content across traditional and digital platforms for a range of health clients. Prior to joining Edelman Catherine spent 13 years as a senior medical writer for BusinessWeek, where she wrote numerous cover stories and followed a broad range of issues facing science, healthcare and medicine. She held primary responsibility for covering the battle over health care reform, wrote extensively for the magazine’s web site and contributed to the “Working Parents” and “Money and Politics” blogs. She covered telecommunications and personal computers for BusinessWeek before taking on the science and medicine beat. Catherine has also written for the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and The Daily Beast. Prior to joining BusinessWeek, she was the London-based European science correspondent for Reuters News Service. She won the 2004 Business Journalist of the Year award from London’s World Leadership Forum, and in 2003 was the first recipient of the ACE Reporter Award from the European School of Oncology for her five-year body of work on cancer. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University.
Bio + Life Sciences
Why Drug Development is Failing – and How to Fix It
The information technology industry has been living by Moore’s Law ever since 1965, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore came up with the rule of thumb that the number of integrated circuits that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years. Contrast this with pharmaceuticals. In a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a wholly different development trajectory was posited, named “Eroom’s Law” (Moore’s Law spelled backwards): the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.
aging + longevity
Mobile Health Apps Not So User-Friendly for Seniors
The rapid proliferation of mobile apps for health could hit a wall not usually associated with smart phones – they may be too hard to use by the patients that need them most. In a paper slated for presentation at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society annual meeting (Oct 22-25, Boston), researchers Laura A. Whitlock and Anne Collins McLaughlin of North Carolina State University warned that self-monitoring apps for diabetics are often not user-friendly for older patients.
apps
Should the FDA Regulate Medical Apps?
At the Consumer Electronics Show last January, the seventh most popular gadget in a popular vote was a wireless glucose meter for diabetics, Telcare BGM.The device reads the glucose level in a drop of blood on a test strip and wirelessly transmits the results to an online database. Telcare’s gadget is just one of a whole raft of mobile health monitoring devices that have come to market during the past year or two. They range from blood pressure cuffs, pulse readers and other types of glucose meters, but all have one thing in common: they must connect to a smart phone.
