Medical technologies are diverse.  Pharmaceuticals and instrumentation alone offer a bewildering variety of investment directions; exotic, contemporary developments such as new monitoring technology, genetic diagnostic tests, and telemedicine, among many other opportunities, are alluring.  But my experience is that there are different ways of knowing something, and to succeed you must master them all.  There is just not enough time to split your attention and still get the job done in the most complete way.

There are valuable lessons that come from the ups and downs of repetitive investments in the same space over a significant period of time.  Living with this focus brings an additional dimension of knowledge that I can only compare to whatever developed instinct leads an athlete to anticipate the next movement of the ball.  I hope I have it.  I know you can’t get it without a prolonged, intense focus.

It helped that I had a medical degree.  But what helped even more was the firm conviction that I did not know enough, could not know enough, because everything was so new.  This gave me a heightened sense of alertness.  Each venture was a learning experience in the truest sense.

Due diligence was the first thing that concerned us.  We looked to leverage naturally occurring due diligence that had already taken place.   We concentrated on products that already existed in the pipelines of pharmaceutical companies where they had earned their place but might be languishing in obscurity.

Determining which of these products had potential was the next due diligence step.  For that, we turned to experts in each specific field of research and we offered them positions in a new venture.  If we had confidence in their credentials and found them willing to bet their careers on a product, then that was our second due diligence indicator, and a powerful one.

thorough evaluations at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research before becoming available for clinical trials in the United States. Therefore, biotechnology executives, such as Dr. Lindsay Rosenwald, need to include time for the government’s testing process, in the development schedule for any new drug.

During the new drug evaluation process, the FDA must receive evidence from pharmaceutical research companies that a drug works as intended. In general, drug companies will perform rigorous animal and laboratory tests to determine the potential health benefits and problems of a particular drug candidate before testing on humans. Then many years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on clinical trials of the drug candidate. After receiving the data, the FDA assembles a team of chemists, physicians, pharmacologists, and statisticians to assess the proposed labeling and decide to either approve the drug for sale or reject it back to the drug company.

To learn more about the new drug development and approval process, visit fda.gov.

role in the development of arsenic trioxide, a highly effective treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia. Until the development of arsenic trioxide more than a decade ago, patients with the disease often faced nearly impossible odds in terms of remission and recovery.

Often known by the brand name Trisenox, arsenic trioxide appears to cause physiological changes in cancer cells and make them undergo apoptosis, or cell death. Additionally, researchers have observed arsenic trioxide’s ability to correct the particular gene responsible for creating the improper protein that results in acute promyelocytic leukemia. The drug has also shown potential in the treatment of certain autoimmune diseases.