Trevor McKendrick - Help your parents

Good morning!

Can I ask you a personal favor?

My 6-month old daughter has Prader-Willi Syndrome. It’s a life-long condition caused by a deletion on her 15th chromosome.

One of the key symptoms of PWS is something called hyperphagia: basically you always feel hungry starting around age 5.

Thankfully there’s a new drug that’s finished Phase 3 clinical trials that greatly reduces the feeling of hunger in people w/ PWS, called DCCR.

The good news is that Phase 3 trials are finished. The bad news is that even then the FDA can refuse to review a drug, or not prioritize it.

So here’s where I’m asking for your help:

Please feel out this survey/petition that will be submitted to the FDA w/ the New Drug Application that, fingers crossed (optimism!), will get the FDA to not only review the drug, but to prioritize it.

It will take about 2 minutes of your time.

Thank you in advance, and again here’s a link to the survey.

Trevor (and Sophie)

Nat Friedman is looking for an intern to help with a microplastics research project this summer in Silicon Valley (tweet)

Pay is $2,000 per week. You can “apply” here.

What to do as your parents get older (article)

Some good ideas in here, ranking by difficulty. Some I liked: spoil them with monthly gifts activities (e.g. buying them movie tickets), text them a picture of whatever you’re working on that day, and just call them.

Norway has a $1.6 trillion investment fund (website)

They take the money they make from oil and put it into this fund. The explicit strategy of the fund is to “seek to achieve the highest possible long-term return with an acceptable risk.”

Because they have so much to invest, they own parts of a lot of companies. And so CEOs the world over and interested in making the fund CEO happy.

And so: the fund CEO has a podcast where he talks to the who’s who of global CEOs. The last 6 guests, in order, were: Marc Andreessen, Shell oil’s CEO, Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Elon Musk, Jack Ma, and DoorDash’s CEO Tony Xu.

Orchid is a company that can do a lot of new testing on human embryos (twitter)

The very first baby that used their testing was recently born.

The brief video goes over what exactly you can see, and it’s pretty incredible. (starts around 3 minutes into the video) They’re the first to do this.

Awesome 3 minute video about New York City (youtube)

Other cities may be cleaner, have better public transport, or have longer histories… but no city has the cultural influence & gravitas & just general “this makes me feel alive”-ness as New York.

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