I had a conversation with a coworker who used to build software for the criminal justice system. To make a long story short, it turned out to be impossible to make a good software system for the criminal justice system. Between the courts, police departments, and government, nobody was willing to give up any data, fearing they would lose their own value in the system.
I fear that healthcare will suffer the same fate. Between insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, patients, governments, and every middleman inbetween, nobody is going to want a system that makes one of them irrelevant.
> Between insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, patients, governments, and every middleman inbetween
You can eliminate middlemen if you can show cost reductions for a player larger than the middleman. The big players are providers, payors and technology (pharma/device) companies. Plenty of middlemen in between those that can be made irrelevant.
You would think that's the case but from experience it's not. I can name two hospitals in NYC that were supposed to see savings from EHR implementations but ended up having multiple competing EHRs that don't speak to each other because of conflicts of interest. You forget there in many cases there are many payors, tech vendors and providers within a single institution.
That's been my experience as well. EHR providers have no incentive to exchange data with each other and will do everything in their power not to. There are regional efforts towards interoperability but there needs to be more political will to mandate cooperation.
Eh, Epic and Cerner interface fine, and offer HL7 interfaces, and Epic in particular bends over backwards to do what their customers want for implementations. My impression was that hospitals are (understandably) reluctant to allow their direct competitors direct access to information they've collected.
I wouldn't go that far with Epic. They always have some unadvertised module they try to push on hospitals the minute they want to interface with a third party.
What about HL7? When I last worked with an EHR system (2? years ago), implementing HL7-based interop with other providers was all the rage so that they could eliminate fax machines when transferring patient records.
You can eliminate middlemen if you can show cost reductions for a player larger than the middleman.
You'd be surprised. Weak decision-makers -- and they are legion -- fear what they don't understand. They'll justify paying a more for a known entity than even entertain a small risk of chaos or disruption.
In a rational world, you'd be right. We don't live there, unfortunately.
It wasn't a bad idea, Wash, but eliminating the middleman is never
as simple as it sounds. ... 'Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen,
and they don't take kindly to being eliminated.
While it is obviously possible to bypass middlemen, people tend to react strongly against anything that appears to be threatening their livelihood.
I think the comment is pretty astute -- this is a big challenge.
Even if Canada, where the state is effectively the sole insurer and determines treatments and pricing for everyone (arguably more centralized than in the UK), the actors in the healthcare system are still wary of connecting to each other.
I learned about this recently from someone I know who is working in "health informatics" at a hospital. Their systems don't share any data with other hospitals, the ministry (the insurer and regulator), etc. There's an initiative to have hospitals in just a single major urban area connected, and despite it being a few years in only a few hospitals are actually participating.
I know Google is making large bets but I am not sure they can make so much of progress that doctors and insurance companies need to worry about their survival. If we ever reach that point, everyone in the population will face the heat.
Doctors and insurance frameworks that act as obstacles domestically may push Google to pursue healthcare developments in other countries with less onerous restrictions. In other words, I'm sure Google will find a path of least resistance to realize the benefits of their investments even if it means going outside of the US market.
Big Pharma will pay huge money for this data. Imagine targeted ads based on your medical history. This was exactly the scenario discussed, solving the "who'll pay?" problem, when our corporate overlords were negotiating data sharing with Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.
Fortunately, at the time, this exploitation of patient data wasn't permitted, so those efforts fizzled out.
I've been out of the game for a few years, so I don't know the current legal and regulatory landscape.
>>nobody was willing to give up any data, fearing they would lose their own value in the system
I suspect this is correct, particularly between the insurance companies and the providers. The coding of what exactly was done directly drives the reimbursement that the providers get. Thus, there's a clear incentive to be opaque and show the insurers only what you need to. Sometimes for good reason (insurers denying coverage solely for cost reasons), sometimes not (billing fraud).
Healthcare has one advantage and that is that the data ultimately is owned by the patients. So this might actually allow them to get access to the data.
Back when healthcare information exchanges were a new thing, one of the competing notions was for patients to "carry" around their own medical records, explicitly granting access on a need-to-know basis. Thumb drive, cloud storage, whatever.
I know that your statement isn't suggesting this strategy. I only mention it to note the logical conclusion of a patient-centric system.
Currently, getting access to your own medical records is like getting your own financial records and credit reports, only worse.
Even though I am my data, it is my identity, my self, none of the aggregators and purveyors, who profit from my data, see it that way, and only comply reluctantly.
Maybe it's theoretically owned by the patient , but is there any place in the world, that if a patient wants the data , in a common electronic format , he gets it ?
Heck, even the stuff you do get is written intentionally in bad handwriting by doctors(which they do so to protect themselves, and probably at a risk of harming patients).
They can always play the political game , like UBER - maybe building a solution and advertising it straight to patients and/or politicians(and legally bribe them if needs be). Once patients groups and politicians will be in the mix , it will be much harder for the healthcare system to resist change.
That's a good point and one that's starting to change a bit with the rise of integrated health systems (payor and provider integration). Intermountain Healthcare is one such organization.
The first rejuvenation biotechnology companies developing therapies to target the aging process itself - rather than producing compensatory/palliative treatments for specific manifestations of late stage aging - are already past their seed stage. Unity Biotechnology and Oisin Biotechnology are both working on different methods of senescent cell clearance, for example. Removal of senescent cells has been demonstrated to extend life in mice, improve cardiovascular health, etc.
It makes sense to back all plausible ventures in this area of development, and since there are at least seven classes of cell and tissue damage that cause aging, there will be a fair number of such ventures in the years ahead. Next up is probably glucosepane cross-link clearance or mitochondrial DNA repair, or perhaps transthyretin amyloid clearance if it ever gets liberated from the disinterested patronage of GSK.
Since Google has a clear interest in this area, even if they are going about it by supporting exactly the wrong lines of R&D at the moment, I imagine they will be involved in the growth of these companies and technologies as they continue to prove themselves effective in animal studies.
The target market is every human being over the age of 30, with a course of treatment every few years to a decade. The treatment will be some form of mass-produced infusion, such as a gene therapy. Comparable technologies from a production standpoint, such as biologics for autoimmune conditions, run at $1-10K per treatment even in the wildly dysfunction US medical system. You can run the numbers; from an economic perspective longevity assurance treatments that work will make most historical therapies look like small potatoes.
Give that another read. Even if Google is supporting the wrong lines of R&D, money is going into the problem, and that's attractive to further development.
There is an audio interview with Aubrey de Grey (SENS Research Foundation) and Brian Kennedy (Buck Institute for Aging Research) in which that is discussed in some detail.
With reference to Calico, the relevant part is this:
"I would say that definitely their hearts are in the right place, but they are a regular, perfectly normal company. They want to make profits fairly soon. Calico have set themselves up as a completely unusual company with the goal of doing something very long-term, however long it takes, they want to actually fix aging. They said so - Larry Page was perfectly clear about that. The question is how are they going about it, and that's getting really interesting. The first thing that they've done, which I feel is an absolutely spectacularly good move, is to bifurcate their work into a relatively short-term track and a long-term track. The short term track involves drug discovery for age-related diseases, doing deals with big companies like Abbvie, and so on. That's all very wonderful and all very lucrative in the relatively short term, and has more or less nothing to do with the mission for which Calico was set up - but it is a fabulous way to insulate the stuff that they do that is to do with why Calico was set up from shareholder pressure. It gets a little more complicated though. So then on the long term side, the stuff being led by David Botstein and Cynthia Kenyon, the question is how are they going about their mission. Of course an awful lot of this unknown because they are a secretive company, but from the perspective of whom they are hiring, and what kinds of work those people have done in the past, one can certainly say that they are not just focusing on one approach. They are interested in diversity. My only real concern is that they may be emphasizing a curiosity-driven long term exploratory approach to an unnecessary degree. I'm all for finding out more and more about aging, but I'm also all for using what we've already found out to the best of our ability to try stuff and see what we can do. I should emphasize that this is only my impression from a very limited amount of information available, but my impression is that it is perhaps turning into an excessively curiosity-driven, excessively basic science, inadequately translational outfit. And that's kind of what I feared when Botstein came along in the first place, because he's on record as saying he doesn't have a translational bone in his body."
The basic point is that they appear to be aiming at drug development to slow aging, which is very hard and speculative. The basic goal is to create a new global metabolic state that ages more slowly than the natural one. The calorie restricted state is an obvious one to try emulating, but that is also very hard: understanding sufficient to do this requires a complete map of cellular biology. More than a decade of research into sirtuins, and a billion dollars in investment, went nowhere for example. That was classed as a promising direction at the outset, and much hyped. But what if you did create a new metabolic state? The outcome would be a small increase in life span, a small slowing in aging, and a therapy that would be useless for old people because they are already damaged.
Compare that with the SENS repair approaches, such as removal of senescent cells, which is already producing far more robust results in mice, and at a fraction of the cost. Such therapies can be used over and again, and produce new benefits each time to the degree that they clear out damage. They are also useful and beneficial for old people, as they will reduce their damage load.
So in short, we can do the slow, expensive, useless path, or the fast, cheap, effective path. So far the research community has chosen the former. Why they have done this is a long, long cultural discussion on incentives and regulation and the nature of how research into age-related diseases has typically worked over the last century. What will change this is a continuing set of convincing animal data from SENS programs.
I can't help but feel the motivating factor here is not helping people live longer (invest in food storage, transportation, and production and help millions of people survive). Instead this seems to me more like wealthy folks beginning to fear the realization that someday they will grow old and die like the rest of us.
Imagine being in a situation where doing anything that benefits both yourself and others is used as evidence of your selfishness because it will benefit you.
When did win/win become a bad thing? Would you rather these rich people were building bigger mansions instead?
Yeah but your way of thinking isn't good for getting karma on HN. Pretty much any HN thread on a big company doing something good is dominated by cynics who cannot fathom the possibility of people out there wanting to make money and benefit the world at the same time.
Speaking as an advocate for the cause, I can assure you that isn't it. Wealth doesn't grant vision. Most wealthy people have exactly the same biases and preconceptions about aging as everyone else.
If it was otherwise, it wouldn't be at all hard to raise funds for initiatives like the SENS Research Foundation's program aimed at medical control of aging. As it is, the number of the ultra-wealthy who have supported this cause is well below 1%, and those have been fairly cautious investments in the grand scheme of things, e.g. those by Peter Thiel.
What is happening at the moment is an initial tipping point of sorts across the entire population in the realization that, hey, treating aging as a medical condition is plausible. Researchers have been saying this for a decade, with increasing volume following the pro-longevity faction winning the cultural battles within the scientific community, but it takes time to bootstrap a movement and get to the point at which Prudential puts up posters suggesting that people should think about living to 150. We may not even be at the main 10% support tipping point yet in the broader population.
A recent Pew study suggests that the majority of people continue to believe that the current state of things is the best state of things, and they don't want live longer because people don't live longer. People want to be slightly better than their peers. Live to 90, because that's a little more than what other people have on average. Be more healthy as you decay into death, because that's a little more than other people have. Stasis is the default opinion, which has always struck me as crazed given the tangible, obvious pace of progress in technology that we are living through.
In the end this is no different than any other field of human endeavor. It takes unreasonable visionaries to force beneficial progress down everyone else's throats, and once done everyone else agrees that it was self-evident and obvious.
Your statement sounds like everything is going well and that this new Alphabet company is just making the situation ever better.
I do not agree: the situation is getting worse: all rates of diseases are growing rapidly. The USA spends the most money on health care and dropped to place 43 on the list of countries with best health. The USA dropped below Cuba!
So it is time to step back and evaluate the situation.
Lets look at cancer. Around 2003 there was a study publisged in the Journal of Oncology stating that 97% of the patients who had radiation or chemo died within 5 years. There is no followup study but since there are no new treatments, the number is most likely the same.
I like a quote of Einstein: repeating the same experiment and expecting a different outcome is insane. So I am against more investments in cancer research since it proves for over 50 years that it does not work.
So what to do?
I suggest to look at the works of the "alternative" doctors who get results.
The medicince that they practise is "functional medicine" and has great results, but there is no double-blind research to their methods. It is time that this changes. Do the research for the various anti-cancer treatments and find out what works best.
There are many other diseases where functional medicine has far better results than allopathic medicine but they are ignored most of the time. The recent online summit by Dr Mark Hyman (the fat summit) had 120,000 viewers so things are changing for the better but there is a long road to go.
I think you might want to take a closer look at the developments in cancer over the past five years. Ipilimumab alone reduced the risk of death in metastatic melanoma patients by 32% - scientists used to not even want to touch the disease because it was such a death sentence. For all its faults, medical research does make progress.
Cynically, I feel the motivating factor is separating old wealthy people from their wealth before their heirs get ahold of it, and who, being much younger, will not spend it on health care.
Clearly this is a cynical move by a company that knows that healthy people are more likely to buy their services than dead ones. It all goes straight to Google's bottom line.
Clearly, the endgame for Google is robots maintaining warehouses full of elderly people, all being forced to watch ads 24x7. (This is also their plan for saving Google+)
Death is a gift. We are not built to live forever and we should never wish it so. I encourage us all to focus on increasing the quality of all of our lives and not the quantity of our days.
"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people; and so long as men die, liberty will never perish."
- Charlie Chapman "The Dictator"
Your dichotomy is a false one. Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days? It seems clear that the goal is to eliminate diseases and decline, which would increase everyone's quality of life.
You're free to continue practicing the barbaric ritual of death if you want.
> Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days?
I think that's a pretty good description of what's going on in the last decade of a lot of people's lives. There's a huge bias toward high risk invasive procedures that have a high probability of leaving the patient debilitated even when the expected lifespan increase is fairly modest. Our penchant for hope in difficult circumstances leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering. There is plenty in modern medical practice to consider 'barbaric'. Skepticism with regard to the current crop of medical utopists is warranted, because assuredly current barbaric medical practices were developed and implemented, overwhelmingly, with the best of intentions.
There is a good technical reason for the present state of medicine for age-related disease, which is that it overwhelmingly addresses proximate causes rather than root causes. Near all treatments attempt to mess with the complex disease state in a late stage of its progression, or in some way compensate for loss of function by adjusting other processes into a higher state of activity. It is expensive, error-prone, and the gains are tiny. The underlying root causes continue to run forward unaddressed.
The research community has only just started the transition into treating root causes, which is to say the aging process itself, the accumulating forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental, not caused by anything other than the normal operation of metabolism. There are initiatives, some of which have reached the stage of clinical translation, but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall expenditure at present.
This will change over the next decade or two as the first results for fundamental damage repair (e.g. senescent cell clearance) become compelling enough and widely known enough to shift the entire field in the right direction.
Dr Dale Bredesen has published an article about a small study where he reversed(cured) Alzheimer in 9 out of 10 patients. The purists will say that a group of 10 is too small to draw any conslusion and mathematically speaking they are right. But the mistake that these people make is that they do not understand that Dr Dale Bredesen is on the right track and what is necessary to repeat the study with a larger group. There is a lot of lack of interest in promising treatments.
Anyway, Dr Dale Bredesen is now doing the second study but I have no idea when the results will be made public. Since the first study showed great results after 4 months of treatment, I am optimistic that it will be faily soon.
The treatment of Dr Dale Bredesen is very different from what the average reader may expect. It is not a medicine-based treatment, but a "general health optimization" treatment with 35 variables. In my opinion, the Alzheimer reversal treatment can be used to prevent Alzheimer, and I hope that in a number of years a study will find out if that is right.
You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams - this is pretty motivating for some people. Steve jobs had this to say in a 2005 commencement speech[1]: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important".
Other people's death's can be a gift as well: tyrants don't get to rule forever, and out-dated ideas die with their generations. Immortality would be a good thing in a "Culture"-like society: i.e. if we manage to solve all the other human problems (like greed and poverty) first
What an insanely bad deal: I pay my life, and I get a thing which somewhat increases the quality of my life, contingent on me having ambitions that are big enough to require a death-sized motivational tool.
Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"? If you live to be a million years old you have a million years to achieve all your dreams, albeit you don't have as much motivation to achieve them in the first 80 years of your life. If you only live 80 years, then you have a lot of motivation to achieve all your dreams in that timespan but (a) your ambitions might not be achievable in 80 years (b) whatever satisfaction you get from achieving your dreams runs out once you die anyway and worst of all (c) you lose 999920 years of life.
It stands to reason that whoever chooses "die at 80" over "die at 1e6" or even "never die" just doesn't value living very much.
> Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"?
First, visit a nursing home. How much is "not dying" worth? Then, visit an elementary school. Given the earth's finite carrying capacity, do you want to have a world with no children?
>First, visit a nursing home. How much is "not dying" worth?
Not dying is hard to divorce from not aging, at least in any significant sense. This isn't an argument about a few extra years in exchange for extended morbidity. Compressed morbidity is a valuable counterpoint to modern medicine's unrelenting treatment, and luckily it's gaining momentum in the medical community. But the therapies in question have very marginal returns. Significant life extension is almost certainly only achievable by keeping us young for a very long time.
It is also critical that we remember the principal of autonomy. For all of the elderly folks who would like to move on, there are many who prefer not to, frailty and all. The fact that some would like to die is no justification for denying treatment to those who do not. Denying life extension to people who desire it, by the same argument, it is equally ridiculous.
>Then, visit an elementary school. Given the earth's finite carrying capacity, do you want to have a world with no children?
No, I suppose not, but nobody has the right to ask another to die so that they may bring a new child into the world. There are lots of benefits I might realize from taking advantage of another's suffering, but that doesn't mean I should be allowed to. There is no "right to be conceived". There is a right to life.
Aubrey de Grey calls it a trance. Since death is inevitable, we tend to bias our reasoning toward its meager positives, whereas if it were a choice, almost nobody would really choose to follow through with it, outside of religious reasons.
People just don't get it. In most cases the current approach to treating the diseases of aging is akin to offering someone with cancer a codeine pill, in other words we are ameliorating the symptoms whilst doing little to attack the underlying root cause of the problem which is aging itself. If we chose to tackle aging by repairing the accumulated damage which arises at a cellular and molecular level instead of treating the end result then the diseases of aging such as Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoarthritis would be reduced by around 95% because these diseases are primarily a direct consequence of old age and rarely afflict young people.
Throughout our history if there has been a route by which we can lead healthier, happier and more productive lives. We have tended to take it and that is the reason why anti-aging medicine will progress down exactly the same route and why the arguments against controlling aging do not have any validity at all.
What makes you think you'll accomplish more in 800 years than in 80? Furthermore why do you assume what you accomplish during that time is of any real benefit to society?
I didn't say either of those things, but I also don't see why they're relevant. I don't have to earn my first 80 years of life with any "accomplishments that are of any real benefit to society" so I don't see why I would have to earn 800 or 8000 or 8 million years, either.
> You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams
For it to be useful as a hard-and-fast deadline, you have to know in advance exactly when it will come. Otherwise, its just knowledge that there will be a deadline at some point in the future, which is very different than a hard-and-fast deadline.
I think everyone has a rough idea on their personal upper limit of their productive time (for me it's 70). There is no lower limit, just like a project with a deadline might be cancelled at anytime.
I do not think baseline homo sapiens have the hardware required to cope with immortality or extended lives (all those memories, lack of the human condition). How bad is time compression experienced at age 7000? A week is a long time to a child, I bet the decades will just fly by. I can imagine the ennui. We would have to evolve into something beyond human to cope with this. It's not going to be in my lifetime, so excuse me for being comfortable with my mortality.
Furthermore, it is an impending erasure of your self. The way people talk about this "deadline", you'd think it's some sort of forced retirement after which you must be satisfied with the life career you've already had.
The disappearance of your experience is no gift, no matter how well you wrap it. I fail to understand how easily many people differentiate between near-term life extension (chemotherapy, beta blockers) and long-term life extension. The "natural" lifespan is a form of anchoring. Anything less feels like you're being fleeced, but ask for too much more, and you're being greedy. But this is nonsense. Nothing, short of religion, prescribes that a certain lifespan is the best one. If you ask for ten more years of quality, everybody thinks it's a worthwhile pursuit of medical research. Come to the end of those ten and ask for ten more, and it's the same worthwhile pursuit without end. Why, then, when we simply apply the shorthand of calling it 100 or 1000 years, does death suddenly sound like a welcome idea-- an idea we think is right to impose on the population? If the common lifespan were 40 years, do you believe you'd consider 80 to be just as silly? If 80 is not so silly under any circumstance, then why is it so special that 160 is wrong to desire?
I'm in my early thirties and am already feeling that my memories are fragile things that will fade, change, or disappear entirely as I age. I'd imagine living forever or even just a millennia would become a very confusing mess of memory.
Living a normal 60-80 year life is like a good book.
Living an eternity would be like taking every page from all the books in a library, randomly shuffling them on the floor, then trying to read through it. Full of people and events, certainly, but devoid of any meaning.
1 year ago I'd have said "YES", now for absurdly cynical reasons my health has plummeted and I wish medicine was many orders of magnitude better since most treatments are heavy, invasive and according to my views stuck in an obsolete era of medical thinking.
Forgive my ignorance but with the UK government being very bullish with enforcing its (in some places google influenced) ideology upon the NHS. My interest in such matters has suddenly piqued.
What are these Health Care software systems? Are they distributed CRUD systems between different locations and actors? Are they event driven systems that push a leaner, more efficient process through the health care system? Are they big data / AI products for the macro that identify patterns to help policy, planning, budgets or micro to help as early warning for identify suspicious patterns in areas, surgeries or even an individuals monitoring?
I can see software being incredibly helpful, I can also see it being thoroughly expensive and intensive if the NHS has to go through a multi-million-pound multi-year tending process that is almost immediately invalidated by factors such as it'll need customising so heavily it'll take years to actually tailor correctly, all medical records will need migrating making the entire system redundant before it starts, it has to work across all trusts at once, all patients have to consent etc.
I want to see this help. Software can really benefit everyone, but I fear we are heading for a horrific car crash of 'enterprise' Health Care IT sucking money out of wards and doctors away from patients.
IMHO that's sad, really. If they focus on things like that, it either means that they feel they don't have much more to bring in their original activity (A.I., networks and computer science), or that they have lost interest in these subjects and want to focus more on "saving lives". Kind of like Bill Gates and his philanthropic activity post-Microsoft.
Philanthropy is nice and all, but that's not why I'm interested in tech companies.
But big pharma companies have existed before Google. I was not interested in them and I don't want Google/Alphabet turn into one of them. If they focus on healthcare, they're doing something completely different which is of no interest to me. As a shareholder of Alphabet, I feel this is some kind of a treason.
That is great! Shareholders never make great decisions, but only look at the profits. So this means that Larry and Sergey have more freedom to do what they want without primarily looking at profits. I sincerely hope that they go for the "alternative" approach and study the docters that get amazing results. I suggest to start with Dr Mark Hyman, Dr David Perlmutter and Dr Dale Bredesen.
I haven't looked at the details as I had not much illusions about it anyway. I was a shareholder before the split and I did not bother selling after it. Maybe I should, and as I said that's sad.
Yeah I was vaguely aware that I had not much voting rights. That's what I meant by saying that I had not much illusions about it. Google is such a cool company that I thought I should own some shares anyway. But if it turns into a healthcare company, I'll get rid of them.
Yes, you can very much look at this as the owners of the tech company taking money out of it and doing something else with it. Google the tech company is hugely profitable, this is not a weird thing for them to do.
My view is somewhat different. Ultimately, all the progress in technology is to make us live better lives, and to accomplish more of what we aim to accomplish. Transportation, energy, computation, etc., are all trying to accomplish the same. Most of these are external to us till now, and we are at the cusp of integrating them into ourselves. I can see why companies are investing significant amount in that regards. 100 years down the line, that's where most of our technology will be used.
Is the distinction really as black-and-white as you suggest?
One example: Flatiron (Google Ventures' biggest health tech investment, if I'm not mistaken) is often described as 'Google for cancer data.' In fact, their mission is "organizing the world's real-world oncology data."
Google did bet on healthcare once before. I don't know if you remember, but they noped out of that after about 2 years, and Microsoft noped out shortly thereafter IIRC.
Once you nope out of something so suddenly, it becomes difficult to convince the market that you're serious about it this time.
Trying to cure cancer or Alzheimer's requires actual medical research, which is a money sink at the scale Google is ill prepared to tolerate. So it'll be some kind of data management one way or another.
Google Ventures is just a VC fund. And they are funding businesses that are largely agreed to be legit enterprises.
The two examples in the article:
Foundation Medicine: sequences tumor cells to use for directing cancer treatment. There have been some high profile cases from academic research centers where this has saved lives. Roche purchased over 50% of the company last year.
Editas: Everyone in biology has heard of CRISPR. The company was founded by Zhang and Doudna, although it is now primarily a Broad company (meaning Zhang). It is led by Bosley who previously led Avila to being acquired by Celgene.
The notion that these investments are not doing "actual medical research" is ridiculous.
Pardon my question, but where is the money spent ? beside researcher's salaries ? What makes the cost so astronomical ? chemicals ? or maybe a virtually inflated cost from companies selling things at premium because they can making every lab setup a sink ? isn't there a way to improve the system by changing the views or the way work is done ?
I'm thinking about SpaceX, they started from scratch and IIRC they cut the costs by 10 (not even counting the reusable rocket game)
my understanding is that google's first foray into health was related specifically to digital health records. their current endeavors are much more broad.
When describing his vision for GV and the health-care areas he wants to invest in, Maris lists genomics, cancer, central nervous system disorders and aging
At the risk of sounding wildly selfish, I hope "central nervous system disorders" includes tinnitus. It's hell.
I suffer from this too and tried the very gimmicky but free/easy trick described at https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light... . It gives me relief for a few minutes. When one has spent as long as one can remember with this noise, even perfect silence for a few minutes is rather heavenly.
The article has too many words like "bets" and "investments".
There is no strategy, other than do something not regulated by the FDA. This is definitely too weak.
A free and great advice: look at Dr Mark Hyman and Dr Dale Bredesen. Study what they do, how they do it and draw your conclusions. I guarantee you, you will be amazed about your own conclusions!
I fear that healthcare will suffer the same fate. Between insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, patients, governments, and every middleman inbetween, nobody is going to want a system that makes one of them irrelevant.