Blogging and Health Policy

Hello, everyone. I want to inaugurate this new blog, Becker's and Beyond - I intend to write about health policy covering a plethora of topics. The title means, on a superficial level, that the topics covered will range from Becker's Muscular Dystrophy to other topics such as FDA regulation of drugs per the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). On a more philosophical level, the title refers to the fact that treatments for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which is essentially a more severe version of Becker's, transform the mutation of DMD into the mutation of BMD. Therefore, treatments for BMD, especially those that use cell and gene therapies, are harder to develop. In a nutshell, the purpose of this blog is to discuss challenging areas in health policy and the development of biomedical technology. I intend to merge my knowledge of health policy and my knowledge of therapeutic strategies. My older sister will also be a contributor to this blog.

For the first post, I will describe the state of FDA regulation for drugs that aim to treat Duchenne. Because many such drugs are currently being manufactured, I will focus on Sarepta Therapeutics' drug therapy for DMD.