When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.

When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.

Savannah Salazar (left) and her mother, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar, who earned a PhD in neurobiology in the quest for a treatment of her daughter's seizure disorder.

LGS Foundation

Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.

“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

drugs

Breakthrough therapies are breaking patients' banks. Key changes could improve access, experts say.

Feature Story Health
Breakthrough therapies are breaking patients' banks. Key changes could improve access, experts say.

Single-treatment therapies are revolutionizing medicine. But insurers and patients wonder whether they can afford treatment and, if they can, whether the high costs are worthwhile.

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CSL Behring’s new gene therapy for hemophilia, Hemgenix, costs $3.5 million for one treatment, but helps the body create substances that allow blood to clot. It appears to be a cure, eliminating the need for other treatments for many years at least.

Likewise, Novartis’s Kymriah mobilizes the body’s immune system to fight B-cell lymphoma, but at a cost $475,000. For patients who respond, it seems to offer years of life without the cancer progressing.

These single-treatment therapies are at the forefront of a new, bold era of medicine. Unfortunately, they also come with new, bold prices that leave insurers and patients wondering whether they can afford treatment and, if they can, whether the high costs are worthwhile.

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Gail Dutton
Gail Dutton has covered the biopharmaceutical industry as a journalist for the past three decades. She focuses on the intersection of business and science, and has written extensively for GEN – Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Life Science Leader, The Scientist and BioSpace. Her articles also have appeared in Popular Science, Forbes, Entrepreneur and other publications.
mental health

How to free our kids - and ourselves - from tech addiction, with Gaia Bernstein

Podcast Tech
How to free our kids - and ourselves - from tech addiction, with Gaia Bernstein

In today's podcast episode, law professor Gaia Bernstein talks about the challenges of keeping control over our thoughts and actions, even when some powerful forces are pushing in the other direction.

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Each afternoon, kids walk through my neighborhood, on their way back home from school, and almost all of them are walking alone, staring down at their phones. It's a troubling site. This daily parade of the zombie children just can’t bode well for the future.

That’s one reason I felt like Gaia Bernstein’s new book was talking directly to me. A law professor at Seton Hall, Gaia makes a strong argument that people are so addicted to tech at this point, we need some big, system level changes to social media platforms and other addictive technologies, instead of just blaming the individual and expecting them to fix these issues.

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Matt Fuchs
Matt Fuchs is the host of the Making Sense of Science podcast and served previously as the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He writes as a contributor to the Washington Post, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Nautilus Magazine, Fortune Magazine and TIME Magazine. Follow him @fuchswriter.