http://www.crookedbrains.net/2009/02/toys.html
Creepy but gut-wrenching series for the Active Life Movement, created by Latinworks. http://www.latinworks.com/new_latin4/index.html
"....instead of using fat kids, they show fat toys: a superhero, a doll and others childhood toys."
http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/latinworks/
Yikes.
| Quote from weekend reading - health types read. Rinse. Repeat. "703.08 While the building business (cross out - insert HC) uses safety factors of four, five, or six-to one, aircraft-building employs only two-to-one or even less because it knows what it is doing (Buckminster you rascal you). The greater the ignorance in the art, the greater the safety factor thatmust be applied. And the greater the safety factor, the greater the redundancy and the less the freedom of load distribution." "We have a mathematical phenomenon known as a geodesic. A geodesic is the most economical relationship between any two events. It is a special case of geodesics which finds that a seemingly straight line is the shortest distance between two points in a plane." Steps for hospitals: 1. Map out every. Single. Care. Process. Start with med admin. Nodes are people, lines between are steps. More than 1:1? Not a straight line? Fail. Redesign. 2. Yes, this probably means you should get an Info Architect, Service Design, IDEO type to come in and show you how to perform the process-mapping equivalent of drawing on the street with sidewalk chalk. |
Link courtesy of the fascinating @floatingbones.
Immersing myself in ice-flow like anatomical structure theory to avoid working in Photoshop.
This is one he&^ of a way to procrastinate....
"Developing Orphan Products: FDA and Rare Disease Day."
http://www.fda.gov/consumer/updates/oda020808.html
http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/rarediseaseday.aspx
Happy Rare Disease Day...if you're one of 25M Americans who haz one, the government haz incentives for pharma to build you a pill.
We define a rare disease as having such a low prevalence that your family doc would only expect to see about 1 case/year.
The NIH Office of Rare Diseases quantifies a rare disease as having a prevalence of less than 200k affected patients (in the US), or 5 people for every 10k in a community.
Thank another form of Reaganomics for pumping support via the Orphan Disease Act, signed into law in 26 years ago.
Rare Disease resources:
http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/
Why rare diseases will increasingly be a focus of medical research:
1. incentives - yay ODA!
2. genomics and personalized medicine (80% are genetic in origin)
3. they hit kids (75%)
4. 1+2+3 = a PR home run for Big Pharma, who could sorely use one
Get your Rare Disease Day poster here:
http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/files/RDD_POSTER_FINAL.pdf
Source: Immunogenic males: a genome-wide analysis of repro...[J Evol Biol. 2009] - PubMed Result.
"In Drosophila melanogaster, mating radically transforms female physiology and behaviour."
What kind of delta are we talking here?
* "increase in the oviposition rate"
* " reduction in female receptivity"
* "activation of the immune system"
"The fitness consequences of mating are similarly dramatic - females must mate once in order to produce fertile eggs, but additional matings have a clear negative effect."
Before you write off this post ladies, consider that we share almost 60% of our genome with those lil' critters who appear if your bananas hang around too long.
"We propose that both sexually antagonistic and natural selection have been important in the evolution of the innate immunity genes, thereby contributing to the sexual dimorphism and rapid evolution at these loci."
Money quote of the morning from HealthCampDC:
"Consumer is a two-way street. Patient is a one way street." via @lostonroute66
I thought Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, and LinkedIn were enough sites and services to make me fully web2.0-fabulous.
Apparently not.
So I'm now on Facebook (sigh - thanks @oldbailey, Char), even though the UI make me think of Excel, and Outlook, and early Hotmail (which was for college n00bs in 1998, just like Ebay before listings had PHOTOS), and thus throw up in my mouth a little.
And then I find this pic of family hiking on Char's Facebook. You don't realize what you miss doing crazy startup stuff until you can see it posted all over every social network in the world.
This pic = cousin Char, cousin Soph, sis Kate+niece Baby Ellen in utero, cousin Julie. I'm the only gal of the fab 5 missing.
But without this photo, and others on their Facebook pages, I'd have missed nearly 7 months of their collective lives.
Do they get the same benefit reading my blog? Nope. As sis said:
"Jen, I read your blog a few times a week. Half the time I have no d&*^ idea what you're talking about, but it's neat to hear what you're working on, even if I don't understand it."
Supportive family + Web 2.0 = not abandoning the startup life.
Kate, this Posterous is for you...:)
From Springwise newsletter | 25 February 2009.
Amazing. Probably the best ecommerce site I've seen since Etsy.
Interesting that Adam named his healthcare proposal after the Jonathan Swift piece that (in)famously promotes eating your own young...
Gotta love satire in the healthcare startup sphere. Yes, we have developed a rather unique and virulent strain of 'humor' and an unfortunate leaning toward the satirical and facetous.
Try working in our sector for a few years and the gallows humor makes more sense.
Health 2.0 startups do sometimes exhibit carnivorous (and cannibalistic) tendencies, especially if you're viewing them from the inside.
From Swift's "A Modest Proposal"
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
"”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ...”
Speaking of eating your young - Keas, Adam Bosworth's health concern - is hiring.
Amazing what you can learn about a company from the job ads...
"Computer Jobs Blog » Blog Archive » Job: KEAS medical SW firm in SF seeks Java Web Site Development Engineer"
http://hotjobs.taragana.com/index.php/archive/job-keas-medical-sw-firm-in-sf-seeks-java-web-site-development-engineer/#
So why do I stay in the industry?
"I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich."
Thanks Jonathan. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Photo: Arabidopsis stem-cells (greenish-yellow) surrounded by differentiating cells (red). Niche cells (not seen here) are located beneath the stem cells. Credit: Reddy lab, UC Riverside.
"Plant stem-cells are master cells located at the tip of the stem and are part of a structure called the shoot apical meristem (SAM). Here, the stem cells—all clumped together—divide throughout the life of the plant to give rise to other cells, resulting in the formation of above-ground organs such as leaves, flowers, branches and stem."
Wonder if author is any relation to Prem Reddy, who's revolutionizing hospital acquisitions?
"In 1927 at the age of 32, bankrupt and jobless, living in inferior housing in Chicago, Illinois, he saw his beloved young daughter Alexandra die of the complications of polio and spinal meningitis. He felt responsible, and this drove him to drink and to the verge of suicide. At the last moment he decided instead to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."
He strove to inspire humanity to take a comprehensive view of the finite world we live in and the infinite possibilities for an ever-increasing standard of living within it. Deploring waste, he explored and advocated a principle that he termed "ephemeralization" — which in essence Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less." Wealth can be increased by recycling resources into newer, higher value products whose more technically sophisticated design requires less material. In practice, it has often meant miniaturization, for example, as when table-model calculating machines were succeeded over time by smaller ones, until the calculator of today fits in one's hand. Fuller also introduced synergetics, which explores holistic engineering structures in nature (long before the term synergy became popular)."
Buy the shirt. http://www.fatamerican.tv/t-shirt-page/buckminster-fuller.htm
Or don't. Commit yourself to doing more for healthcare reform and innovation, with less. What can you build with what you've got, right now?
SXSW wear. Bring your Moleskin notebooks and Apple comps littered w/ web 3.0 fabulous stickrs...
A more plausible explanation is that a common exposure underlies infertility and testicular cancer
Genoanthropology update...
Male 'tribes' of RNA and sex-linked traits (search for "Red Queen" theory - Matt Ridley, etc).
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE51M70D20090223?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Ah, the beauty of a simple pie graph, especially when it's programmed to show my daily caffeine intake (gulp)...
Personal biometrics are on my top 5 list for disruptive, consumer/patient oriented innovations, along with DTC genomics and other genetic profiling studies (genoanth, etc).
Question is, how do we get people to WANT to enter in this data?
We've got people who are patients with chronic diseases, and also in the top 10 (10-80-10 rule) percent of hyperengaged e-patients (if we're being optimistic) on lock, but what about the middle 80?
What kind of tools do we need to create to ensure it's as easy for people to enter personal health narrative nodes as possible?
In part this is a rhetorical question - some of the tools already exist. What would incentivize you to enter personal biometrics?
(And no, helpful friend who responded yesterday during a brainstorming conversation, I do *not* think a unique lewd photo send via email is the right tactic...although we'd get the 18-24 yo male population's participation for sure).
"Despite their forbidding name, natural killer cells are the good guys in the never-ending war against disease."
Job Ad for 'Ninja' aka Natural Killer Cells -
"Wanted: Cells capable of wreaking havoc. Loner types who identify a target and then recruit team members as needed. Must be aggressive yet equally discriminating, able to identify normal, allogeneic tissues on the fly."
Figure 3 : Natural killer cells and dendritic cells: rendezvous in abused tissues - Nature Reviews Immunology
From the following article:
"Natural killer cells and dendritic cells: rendezvous in abused tissues"
-Alessandro Moretta
Nature Reviews Immunology 2, 957-965 (December 2002)
doi:10.1038/nri956
http://www.nature.com/nri/journal/v2/n12/fig_tab/nri956_F3.html
See also:
"Some of your body's cells have a 'license to kill'" (PhysOrg.com)
February 22nd, 2009 By Robert S. Boyd in Medicine & Health / Research
http://www.physorg.com/news154541184.html
"These tiny assassins, the immune system's rapid-response team, can quickly spot a dangerous cell, poke holes in its outer wall and release poisons to destroy it. They also alert other immune cells to join the attack."
Like some espionage agents, NK cells have a "license to kill," according to Wayne Yokoyama, an immunologist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. The "license" is a molecular tag that allows a killer cell to whack a bad cell.
Although NK cells were discovered more than 30 years ago, they're still not well understood, and they remain an active field of research. Scientists are trying to figure out how killer cells "see" a target cell, how they tell whether it's infected or healthy and how they carry out their lethal task.
"We remain puzzled about where and when NK cells develop," James Di Santo, the director of the immunology department at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, acknowledged in the journal Nature Immunology. "We still have many questions."
Like some espionage agents, NK cells have a "license to kill," according to Wayne Yokoyama, an immunologist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. The "license" is a molecular tag that allows a killer cell to whack a bad cell.
Although NK cells were discovered more than 30 years ago, they're still not well understood, and they remain an active field of research. Scientists are trying to figure out how killer cells "see" a target cell, how they tell whether it's infected or healthy and how they carry out their lethal task.
Like some espionage agents, NK cells have a "license to kill," according to Wayne Yokoyama, an immunologist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. The "license" is a molecular tag that allows a killer cell to whack a bad cell.
Although NK cells were discovered more than 30 years ago, they're still not well understood, and they remain an active field of research. Scientists are trying to figure out how killer cells "see" a target cell, how they tell whether it's infected or healthy and how they carry out their lethal task.
"We remain puzzled about where and when NK cells develop," James Di Santo, the director of the immunology department at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, acknowledged in the journal Nature Immunology. "We still have many questions."
Interesting update by Bruce Friedman on Lab Soft News re: Dubai's "Healthcare City" development:
http://labsoftnews.typepad.com/lab_soft_news/2009/02/update-on-dubai-healthcare-city-not-so-good.html
Sounds like a mass exodus. What's next in healthcare will *not come from the super-funded middle east...
Health/medical cyborg anthropology lifehack of the week...
Steps available with photo slideshow and via text (PDF).
Problem - all your info is actually stored ON the drive.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How_To_Emergency_Records_On_USB_Thumb_Drive/
From: "Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life" - NewScientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.html?full=true
"IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree."
"For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree."
"But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded."
"So what happened? In a nutshell, DNA. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 opened up new vistas for evolutionary biology. Here, at last, was the very stuff of inheritance into which was surely written the history of life, if only we knew how to decode it."
"The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes rather than just RNA. Everybody expected these DNA sequences to confirm the RNA tree, and sometimes they did but, crucially, sometimes they did not. RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse."
"As more and more genes were sequenced, it became clear that the patterns of relatedness could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species - often across huge taxonomic distances - in a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT)."
""There's promiscuous exchange of genetic information across diverse groups," says Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine."
"The most likely agents of this genetic shuffling are viruses, which constantly cut and paste DNA from one genome into another, often across great taxonomic distances."
"This genetic free-for-all continues to this day."
See a pattern emerging?
We underestimated the importance of DNA.
We underestimated the importance of RNA.
We underestimate the importance of HGT.
We underestimate the importance of viruses.
We underestimate the importance of bacteria.
We underestimate the collaborative and competitive relationships (wars, treaties) that emerge as a result of inter-species interplay (RNA tribes, viruses, bacteria).
Note to self: Keep scribbling in your notebook.
Note to self 2: Forget the soccer field (or at least balance it out with a little RNA-type research) - get your kid to science summer camp. 23andme, can you hook us up with a program for school-age kids?
For your weekend perusing pleasure...
""You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" - Buckminster Fuller
"..if we're successful, what we want to do is to get to the point where the only problems we have in scholarly communication are technical." - John Wilbanks
Science Commons Project: http://sciencecommons.org/
and Health Commons: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/healthcommons/
See also:
*Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/
*P2P Foundation: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/
*PLoS: http://www.plos.org/
*Foundation for P2P Alternatives: http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives
http://rosemarylucycosentino.blogspot.com/2009/02/tim-hortons-maple-custard-donut.html
Affordable eye-candy by artist Rosemary Lucy Cosentino. For foodies, calorie-free.
Awesome. Something else new and delicious comes to/from Boston, which soon might supplant DC as the #epicenter for healthcare innovation (sorry Ted Eytan:).
Let's keep score:
1. RAND's opening an office
2. TechStars is opening an incubator
3. They've already got an active Health 2.0 chapter.
4. Marquee Health 2.0, eHealth, mHealth companies are there (think American Well).
5. The city houses a unique hospital innovation cluster (Paul Levy, John Halamka at BIDMC).
6. Vitality shows every medtech and device manufacturer out there up with verve and the Glow Cap connect bottle.
CNN coverage of the Glow Cap connect here: http://tinyurl.com/5rrdet
Much better than a spoonful of sugar...GlowCaps flash and play music to remind you to take your pills. It's even backed by Amazon's A-z moneyback guarantee.
In case that doesn't cut it, you can choose to have the program CALL YOUR PHONE.
Sector significance? Finally we're getting to the 4th C of the Nexthealth model - the coherence factor (Content+Community+Commerce+Coherence = Nexthealth).
The Glow Cap Connect even nails down the Community portion via "social network support" - an option lets you send a weekly update to a friend, family member, or caregiver (love that you have the option to share this update at will with whomever you choose - power to the patients!).
Vitality is achieving semantic interoperability of medication delivery - a reminder to take your meds, available online and offline, at will.
And the tech is amazing - the cap is even supposed to COUNT YOUR PILLS and remind you to refill them at the pharmacy.
Incentives are taken into account: "Each month, GlowCaps mail you and your doctor a report with incentives if you exceed your adherence goal." Wow.
When Vitality link to a PHR and enables e-prescribing and auto refills, and then has the cap ping you with an email or call when the Rx is ready for pickup (or when a mail-order pharma order has been fulfilled and is on its merry way to your front door, that will really be something).
In addition to product cred, they've got the people part nailed down - definitely one to watch. Check out management team bios here: http://www.rxvitality.com/management_team.html.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, is on the Board: http://www.rxvitality.com/advisory_board.html
Contact info:
Email us at info@rxvitality.com
Send us mail at:
Vitality
Attn: GlowCap SOLO Stories
1 Broadway 14th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
| Foodzie has impressed the heck out of me since they joined TechStars last summer, and when I saw they sell Whirly Poppers, well, it's all over for me. I've decided all 'corporate' or thank - you gift purchases will now come from Foodzie. 1.800.Flowers no more. In fact, that's a great potential future division, Foodzie folks - corporate gifting. Some more ideas (who knows if any are worth a damn)...
|
| In healthcare, we're constantly arguing about whether or notthe 'consumerisation' (or "Appleisation, Disneyisation" etc) of medicine is a good thing. But that's probably the wrong conversation on which to spend multiple exhalations. Is medicine Art or Science? It doesn't much matter, as long as it's delivered safely and effectively (in a competitive, transparent, market-based environment free of state by state regulated coverage monopolies). And like most dichotomies, this one's artificial...the reality is some aurea mediocritas. Here's the thing - whether you believe medical care planning and delivery is Art or Science or happy middle ground doesn't really matter. Unless we look to increasing consumerism and commercialization healthcare will bankrupt the nation with a speed and velocity only slightly less frightening than the current financial meltdown. "U.S. health care spending is expected to increase at similar levels for the next decade reaching $4.3 TRILLION in 2017, or 20 percent of GDP.1" Take a breath. Reread that. We're talking no moolah (or at least significantly less $ available via really really necromanced budget bending) for school funding, infrastructure maintenance, college loan programs, much less 'entitlement' programs like CMS. There are areas, however, relatively limited in scope, where it pays to think of the healthcare as a consumptive, commercial market with disparate customer segments. Especially when you're talking about brining a new development (good/service) to market. Innovation in applied biotech and health pay off. It's the old science vs. applied science (tech) routine. Science for the sake of research for its own sake is paying less. Health tech development, however, draws a nice chunk of change - certainly more than selecting a second-rate tenure track position. Let's take a look at some specific (and cool) examples of innovation collaboratives and challenges that pay (the concept and feel behind Nexthealth, minus the revenue model). The good news? A few exist. The bad news? Most rampantly underpay for really important stuff. And some innovation challenges are just really, really ugly...(a "Wave Sphere?" Honestly?) Case in point (found while trolling the lastest batch of InnoCentive challenges) - figure out a way to shorten clinical trial time for cancer Rxs? Good for you. "Solvers are encouraged to provide insights into means of accelerating Phase II and Phase III of clinical trials conducted both in the U.S. and abroad." If you can do this, there's a 10k check on the way...(and jump on it, because you've only got until April 11th). There is, however, some big money in healthcare innovation challenges... "Phreesia, maker of electronic tablets to replace those pesky intake clipboards at doctors’ offices, announced today that it brought in $11.6 million in a round led by BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners and Sandbox Industrie." (Thanks to @medicalquack for covering the funding round in more detail here). Surprisingly (#sarcasm), these contests are often funded by health insurance companies. Payors paying to find better ways to not pay so much for healthcare? Seems like a good investment to me. It's the industries inside track to funding self-interested 'comparative effectiveness' research. But healthcare VC funding rounds are still oftent transfered via a closed ecosystem of inbred investment dollars cycling through the insiders' healthcare Beltway. I'd like to see some HIT, eHealth, and mHealth startups venture out (pun fully intended) and engage with incubator tech programs like YCombinator and TechStars. The pay for these incubators is generally low (18k for this summer's 20 TechStars teams in Boulder and Boston), but there are happy returns other than sparse funding, including getting the attention of VCs not entrenched in the Health 2.0 space. For success stories, first take a look at Posterous - a YCombinator participant (easy enough if you're reading this via Twitter or Blogger at Health Management Rx, as I published at both places through Posterous with one click - using the service is as simple as typing up this email to myself and hitting the 'send' button). Next check out Foodzie - a TechStars beacon of relative early acheivement that's any gourmands wet dream. So, healthcare IT. Startups. Healthcare incubators (here, here, and here) New blood and all that...only question is, who in our sector (if anyone) is brave enough to donate plasma for the transfusion? It would take one hell of a team to stack up against tech entrants, or one hell of an innovation challenge to attract teams from outside the 'typical' healthcare startup strata. It's going to be a very interesting summer... |
"The final economic stimulus bill permits Americans' personal health information to be exchanged and sold -- without patients' consent -- for research and public-health purposes, warns the Institute for Health Freedom (Washington, DC) and Citizens' Council on Health Care (Saint Paul, MN)."
"Women who drank two to three cups a day had a 19% reduction in the risk of all strokes." Bottoms up ladies.
| The future of publishing, books, newspapers - somebody hire this crackpot team to consult on healthcare! Stat! |
| Read the NDHIT panel's final report on Scribd here. Some folks on Twitter may remember participating in the dialogue, which ran a very limited engagement, from October 27 to November 3, 2008. Use TwitterSearch to check for this hashtag: #nationaldialogue, or follow the National Dialogue here: @natldialogue. The panel posed one vital, seemingly innocuous question to a global community of readers: "How should we expand the use of information technology and protect personal privacy to improve health care?" The original website, which engaged many health/medical tweets (myself included) is still accessible here. 24 pages of ideas were submitted. Some of the niftiest National Dialogue outputs are the 'Opinion Tracker' word/tag cloud visualizations here, tracking "conversations around the Internet (in forums, communities, blogs and videos) to show what people are thinking and saying about how information technology can be used to improve healthcare while safeguarding privacy." This final report will be presented to the next administration, Federal Chief Information Officers Council, Office of Management and Budget, General Services Administration, and other "relevant" federal agencies. I'll be tweeting nuggets of interest from the 68 page report today via @jenmccabegorman. Jen McCabe Gorman neXthealth NL Health Management Rx Twitter: jenmccabegorman http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmccabegorman Skype: jenmccabegorman Blackberry: 301.904.5136 Dutch Mobile: +31655585351 jennifermccabegorman@yahoo.com |
| Roche gets down with RNAi therapies, licenses tech from MDRNA, Inc: "Roche will obtain a non-exclusive license to a portion of MDRNA's technology platform for the development of RNAi-based therapeutics. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed." J. Michael French, President and Chief Executive Officer of MDRNA: "This agreement provides us the necessary resources to continue to pursue multiple, non-exclusive research collaborations, as well as future financing opportunities." "Our goal is to improve human health through the development of RNAi-based compounds and drug delivery technologies that together provide superior therapeutic options for patients. Over the past decade, we have developed substantial capabilities in molecular biology, cellular biology, lipid chemistry, peptide chemistry, pharmacology and bioinformatics, which we are applying to a wide range of RNAi technologies and delivery approaches. These capabilities plus the in-licensing of key RNAi-related intellectual property have rapidly enabled us to become a leading RNAi-based therapeutics company with a pre-clinical pipeline in key therapeutic areas including oncology, metabolic disorders and inflammation." Saved the best for last... Genetic mapping at birth viable in five years? Like footprint and birthweight - we may just start recording Junior's entire genome... "Every baby born a decade from now will have its genetic code mapped at birth, the head of the world's leading genome sequencing company has predicted. A complete DNA read-out for every newborn will be technically feasible and affordable in less than five years, promising a revolution in healthcare, says Jay Flatley, the chief executive of Illumina. Only social and legal issues are likely to delay the era of “genome sequences”, or genetic profiles, for all. By 2019 it will have become routine to map infants' genes when they are born, Dr Flatley told The Times. This will open a new approach to medicine, by which conditions such as diabetes and heart disease can be predicted and prevented and drugs prescribed more safely and effectively. The development, however, will raise difficult questions about privacy and access to individuals' genetic records. Many people may be reluctant to have their genome read, for fear that the results could be used against them by an employer or insurance company. The prospect of genome screening for all has emerged because of the plummeting cost of the relevant technology. The Human Genome Project, which published its first rough sequence of mankind's genetic code in 2001, cost an estimated $4billion (£2.7billion). By the time the scientists James Watson and Craig Venter had their genomes mapped two years ago, the cost had fallen to about $1m (£700,000). Genotyping services, which examine about 2million of the genome's 6billion DNA letters for clues to disease, are already available to consumers for about $1,000 (£700). Those with deeper pockets can have their whole genome mapped for about $100,000 (£70,000). Illumina is preparing to launch a much cheaper whole-genome service within two years. It has already begun seeking consent from its first customers, who are likely to pay between $10,000 and $20,000 (£7,000-£14,000). Last month, Illumina announced a deal with Oxford Nanopore, a British company that is developing a new approach to sequencing that could bring costs down further. In an interview with The Times, Dr Flatley said a genome sequence should be available for less than $1,000 (£700) in three to four years. “The limitations are sociological; when and where people think it can be applied, the concerns people have about misinformation and the background ethics questions. “I think those are actually going to be the limits that push it out to a ten-year timeframe,” he added. A baby's genome can be discovered at birth by a heel-prick blood test, similar to the one that is already used to screen for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. By examining which genetic variants a person has inherited, it is possible to identify raised risks of developing an array of conditions, (NOTE: genetic predisposition does not equal disease Dx certainty, at least not at this early Wild West stage of genomic understanding) including cardiovascular disease and many cancers. Those at high risk can then be screened more regularly, or given drugs or dietary advice to lower their chances of becoming ill. As DNA affects the way certain drugs are metabolised, personal genomes could also be used to ensure that patients get the medicine that is most likely to work for them and least likely to have side-effects. Personal genome sequencing, however, will raise legitimate concerns about privacy, “Bad things can be done with the genome. It could predict something about someone — and you could potentially hand information to their employer or their insurance company,” said Dr Flatley. “Legislation has to be passed.” Complete genetic privacy, however, was unlikely to be possible, he added. “People have to recognise that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can't be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind.” As the benefits become clearer, however, he believes that most people will want their genomes read and interpreted. The apparent benefits would soon eclipse the hazards." Jen McCabe Gorman neXthealth NL Health Management Rx Twitter: jenmccabegorman http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmccabegorman Skype: jenmccabegorman Blackberry: 301.904.5136 Dutch Mobile: +31655585351 jennifermccabegorman@yahoo.com |
| Nice to know we're on top of things... Jen McCabe Gorman neXthealth NL Health Management Rx Twitter: jenmccabegorman http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmccabegorman Skype: jenmccabegorman Blackberry: 301.904.5136 Dutch Mobile: +31655585351 jennifermccabegorman@yahoo.com |
| http://www.jopsa.org/?p=59 From Josh's site: A few, very committed individuals - my mother and sister - set out to answer that question. My mom, Casey Nesbit (DPT), receives every message that is sent to the hospital, via email (thanks to a simple forwarding command in FrontlineSMS). Those messages are in Chichewa. For four months, she translated every message to English. My sister, Elizabeth Nesbit, decided to code and organize every SMS sent by the CHWs. She’s a sophomore at Rice University, making her way to medical school. She categorized messages by keywords and/or phrases (e.g. symptoms, supplies, patient updates/referrals, deaths, requests for help, requests for visits, meeting coordination). Under this introduction is a list of all the symptoms found in messages communicated to the hospital. Elizabeth sorted these symptoms out into categories (body pains, digestive and urinary tract, respiratory tract, swelling, skin and sores, malaria and fever, weakness, heart problems, cancer, and other). She broke apart every incoming message this way. Below the symptom list, you’ll find the fruit of their combined efforts - charts explaining the subject matter of texts to the hospital. Click on any of the charts to view a larger version. These messages fell between mid-August and early December. Shoot me an email if you want to see more of Elizabeth’s analysis." This is how healthcare gets done right. Hospitals, what's your excuse for not using mHealth?Congrats Josh on an excellent project - looking forward to following Jopsa for outcomes data. |
| http://www.jopsa.org/?p=59 Check out the symptom tag cloud, resultant pie charts/graphs, and the fact that this research was done for St. Gabriel's Hospital for a project called Mobiles in Malawi. From Josh's site: "What’s everyone texting about? A few, very committed individuals - my mother and sister - set out to answer that question. My mom, Casey Nesbit (DPT), receives every message that is sent to the hospital, via email (thanks to a simple forwarding command in FrontlineSMS). Those messages are in Chichewa. For four months, she translated every message to English. My sister, Elizabeth Nesbit, decided to code and organize every SMS sent by the CHWs. She’s a sophomore at Rice University, making her way to medical school. She categorized messages by keywords and/or phrases (e.g. symptoms, supplies, patient updates/referrals, deaths, requests for help, requests for visits, meeting coordination). Under this introduction is a list of all the symptoms found in messages communicated to the hospital. Elizabeth sorted these symptoms out into categories (body pains, digestive and urinary tract, respiratory tract, swelling, skin and sores, malaria and fever, weakness, heart problems, cancer, and other). She broke apart every incoming message this way. Below the symptom list, you’ll find the fruit of their combined efforts - charts explaining the subject matter of texts to the hospital. Click on any of the charts to view a larger version. These messages fell between mid-August and early December. Shoot me an email if you want to see more of Elizabeth’s analysis." This is how healthcare gets done right. Congrats Josh on an excellent project - looking forward to following Jopsa for outcomes data. |
| I'm betting on the latter...mutations can exist without causing disease - shocker! Where do they think we get widows peaks, the ability to curl tongues, and the propensity for 'wisdom' teeth? "And while most nonsense SNPs produce a slight evolutionary drawback, some actually seem to be advantageous." http://www.genomeweb.com/node/911368?emc=el&m=306426&l=3&v=821d957008 Jen McCabe Gorman neXthealth NL Health Management Rx Twitter: jenmccabegorman http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmccabegorman Skype: jenmccabegorman Blackberry: 301.904.5136 Dutch Mobile: +31655585351 jennifermccabegorman@yahoo.com |
