Correcting a handful of misconceptions, inaccuracies and falsehoods in "The blood cancer that became solvable" by Ruxandra Teslo and Amol Punjabi

As a fan of Ruxandra Teslo’s writing — 25 mentions to date! — it pains me to write that her recent article in “Works in Progress”, for which she shares the byline with Open Evidence chief product officer Amol Punjabi, had me wince about a half-dozen times too many to ignore. Worse yet, I agree with the thrust of the article: that China is eating America’s lunch in cell and gene therapy and will soon come for the rest of biomedicine. Heck, that is one of the main reasons I am soon going back to clinical medicine, seeing too many business flights to Shanghai and Beijing time zone Zoom meetings in my future ⊕ [Note: In case you were wondering, the correct number of each for me personally is exactly zero. ] had I continued down the industry path. Alas, Teslo, Punjabi and whichever LLM did their research had cut too many corners on the way to the largely appropriate destination. Let’s count a few of them. The old, cheap generic chemotherapy drugs still rock. A combination of two or three…