Del Bigtree and Jeffery Jaxon cover a new law that allows the pharmaceutical industry to skip animal testing and instead use computer modeling to test new medications in-silico, in “virtual patients” to “convince” the FDA that there medications have been “robustly” tested. That was a mouth full. The story takes a while to get to this point. It does cover some other good information about the cozy relationship between Big Pharma and the regulatory agency charged with protecting us from an industry that can be overly eager to push a product to market. The use of computer models of virtual patients to test medications is insane. Anyone that has a couple of brain cells to formulate a thought can understand that a computer model is only as good as the variables used to build it. It is ripe for fraud via models that are tuned to the scenario in a manner that provides the desired results. Its the age old computer term GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). If you use garbage to build your model, you will get garbage out the other side.
