Former White House advisor Dean W. Ball argues recent breakthroughs in gene editing and obesity demand faster FDA approvals

@ben_golub @deanwball Oh damn is quietly another AI word?!

That’s genuinely sad for me—and for readers everywhere.

@DKThomp Need to stay alive and relatively fit for 10-15 years to benefit from the magic that's about to happen.

Hey Derek, I'm fascinated by the sudden tone on X around the Verve gene editing data. A lot of people are suddenly seeing the company's vision. That's a complete reversal from a few years ago, when most people just got an ick from it.

This is cool! I have equipoise on this one! But... the fundamental argument was the same for Verve's previous entrant before it hit safety worries! We've got a long while to argue back and forth on this one, even though it IS super neat.

And, honestly, except for RevMed, anyone following could have told you most of this eight weeks ago.

What has changed in that time is there have been update's to X's Pheonix algorithm for deciding what posts get shown on X.

@DKThomp I wonder what the cultural politics of a spike in life expectancy will be? "Deaths of despair" felt so true to people; I don't think we're going to see a similarly metaphorical interpretation (but positive) here ....

@DKThomp @deanwball How are you feeling about the word quietly having quietly been killed

@DKThomp GLP-1 agonists are doing what we told people diet and exercise could do for decades. The irony: the same stress and cortisol that drives obesity also blunts the body's natural GLP-1 response. Fix the stress first, and the biology follows.

@DKThomp Retatrutide melting fat at record levels is wild, but I am more curious how fast these actually reach patients outside trial settings. The gap between promising data and real access is usually the bigger story.

@DKThomp You missed a big one. NTLA, first phase 3 in vivo gene editing trial reported. (HAE, a rare disease) Excellent results: look at how many events after the placebo crossover

@DKThomp Is retatrutide anti-inflammatory better than tirzepatide?

@CodyLonning @DKThomp

@DKThomp Record fat loss. Record inflammation reduction. Still zero protocol for the muscle underneath. The breakthroughs are real. The gap is still the same.

@DKThomp We've known how to reduce the mortality of heart disease and cancer for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And do it for free.

@DKThomp @ben_golub @deanwball It’s not just killed, it’s excommunicated.

@DKThomp @deanwball It’s a little confusing to call lorlatinib “this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors”. It targets one very specific and fairly rare oncogene driver in lung cancer - ALK rearrangement. It’s a great drug for that small patient group, but it doesn’t work for most cancers.

@DKThomp @Noahpinion @grok tell me about “Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection”

@DKThomp It would be interesting to ask the people on the ground in these fields how ai is helping them specifically with their work

@apoorv3E @DKThomp Part of my thought process on this is the ability to feel good working out is why many individuals on the heavier side tend not to take the first steps. If weight loss medication takes the first steps for them, people may become more motivated!

@DKThomp Reta next to pancreatic cancer drugs in a miracle-month roundup is a crazy legitimacy jump

@DKThomp Hey, that's really cool news! Don't know why you had to share it from a notorious race science account, rather than like, I don't know, any public health or general science people out there who aren't constantly tweeting about "black crime" or whatever

the through-line on all five is that they're reported as averages.

retatrutide's fat loss, the one-and-done PCSK9 edit, the lorlatinib curve, daraxonrasib's survival. each is a mean across a population, and each hides a wide responder split underneath.

the unsolved problem under every line of that list is the same one: figuring out which side of the average a given patient lands on before you dose them, not after. none of these readouts touch it yet.