Let us assume that you are a technological early adopter, a maker, a hacker, a geek. Your software/hardware skills and experiences are much better than the bulk of licensed physicians. You also have a G1.
Now imagine a mobile application/gadget-in-a-belt-pouch that is the most advanced telemedicine solution in the market. With this application/gadget you were able to non-invasively monitor vital signs of the people that matter you the most at anytime from anywhere around the world. You were able to quickly recognize life threatening heart and respiratory problems of the people you care about and maybe save their lives.
The problem is that such a product exists according to this press release (via androidguys) but you are not allowed to legally use it (no information on the details of purchase yet) unless you are a registered and licensed physician. The press release does not offer any reasonable (legal?) explanation on why this is the case.
The first Euro Maker Faire in Brussels was an evening event but now with the first UK Maker Faire makers have a chance to hang around for 2 days and develop or deepen their DIY skills similar to the original US events (we enjoyed AustinMakerFairein 2007). Let me know if you’re interested.
from my mailbox:
We are shortly to publicly announce the first UK Maker Faire but thought you would appreciate advanced notification.
The Make team forwarded me your names and email addresses as they believe you might be interested in the Newcastle upon Tyne Maker Fair on March 14th-15th 2009.
The first UK Maker Fair will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March as part
of Newcastle ScienceFest – a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and
innovation.
This two-day, family-friendly event celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset and features interactive exhibits organized by individual enthusiasts, hobbyist groups and clubs as well as student groups. It’s for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things. Maker Faire is an opportunity to share what you do with others. Read the rest of this entry »
forwarded, nonpersonal mail from Maya Kennard (you might get that email too):
Resource link/Story suggestion for your website:Title: VADLO – Biomedical Search Engine
Description: Vadlo is a search engine for the biology/biomedical scientists, educators, clinicians and reference librarians. References
Also check the Daily cartoons!
The idea is that we feed them with searches and links and they will grow big enough to give us more and more relevant searches and links. Magic concept: scalability, check the motivation behind the name choice:
Vadlo: (vud-lo) – Vadlo is a large fig tree characterized by aerial roots that eventually become accessory trunks. This allows it to grow horizontally to amazing proportions.
I find the 5 basic search categories amazing and after a short tinkering it can already throw out interesting sources:
From the about page:
Protocols category will let you search for methods, techniques, assays, procedures, reagent recipes, plasmid maps, etc. Online Tools Read the rest of this entry »
This is a golden day for 23andMe despite all crisis worries:
Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) October 30, 2008 — TIME Magazine announced today that the Personal Genome Service™ from 23andMe, Inc. has been named 2008′s Invention of the Year. 23andMe was chosen as the year’s most significant invention for its exceptional work in making personal genomics accessible and affordable.
From the industrial point of view what are the components of success here besides the obviously good team:
- mission: big, Google-sized mission: revolution of health care by personal genetic information as the source of upcoming personalized medicine
- biotechnology: based on the highest available technology platforms in microarrays (Illumina) (watch out, next gen sequencing is in the corner!)
- capital investment and network effect: I can only repeat myself: 23andMe is probably the most well-connected and backed startup in the history of Silicon Valley.(photo: happy 23andMe founders and early customers)
- information technology the cool and user-friendly factor of the browser based service is really amazing (in the past couple of weeks I demonstrated it to a bunch of people and even those were able to catch the essence of the available information who are older, web-unsavvy)
- simplicity of service: you just spit 2ml into a tube and FedEx it
- most aggressive marketing strategy based largely on the network effect among the power elite of the USA (and consequently, the world)
From the consumer point of view let me tell you 1 personal example of the lifestyle effect of the service: Read the rest of this entry »
The Google Tech Talks channel on YouTube slowly but irresistibly became my private university in current tech trends. Here is a recent talk on the amazing HealthMap by its developers John Brownstein, Clark Freifeld, Mikaela Keller. According to the about page:
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.
I ordered my first commercial genetic profile from 23andMe on the 9th of September online, FedExed my 2 ml saliva from Budapest to 23andMe, Mountain View on the 12th of September. I got the results today. That said within 3 weeks since the birth of the idea I purchased more than 500 000 SNPs of mine analyzed, evaluated and ready to be browsed. With this step I finally and quickly entered into the age of personalized genetics no matter how embryonic it is.
After a superficial first scan of my results I can say that it is a really interesting thing that instantly pushes me towards accumulating more knowledge on the personalized genetics field concerning specific traits, stats, risks and studies.
Here is a first look on what my Y chromosome SNPs are saying on my paternal haplogroup:
I learned for instance that based only on my genotype and not any environmental factors involved I have a lower than average riskRead the rest of this entry »
It was already known that amongst the Google top people Sergey Brin is the one who is most interested in pushing biotechnology and the biomedical sciences: in his Stanford years he was interested in biology courses according to The Google Story, he married Anne Wojcicki (who graduted from biology at Yale), Google invested $4.4 million into 23andMe the pioneering personal genomics company co-founded by Anne, then Google invested into 23andMe competitor Navigenics too.
Now Sergey Brin added another, serious and personal reason to think that he is really, personally committed to the quick progress in the biomedical sciences: in his new blog – already a bit of an Internet history – called Too he disclosed that using the 23andMe personal genetics service he figured out something worrying about his and his family’s risk of Parkinson disease (his mother and her aunt are being already diagnosed with PD):
“I learned something very important to me — I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. The exact implications of this are not entirely clear. Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases. Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure.
The G2019S mutation is actually the rs34637584 SNP and lies in the gene LRRK2 encoding leucine-rich repeat kinase on chromosome 12. The mutation affects the first codon of the gene and is a guanine (G)-to- adenine (A) substitution resulting known as a missense and leads to a glycine – serine (hence the name) amino acid conversion in the protein product. Here is how the SNP position looks in the 23andMe browser using the sample family, the Mendels.
There is a nice initiative now in Budapest dedicated to the present and future of high technology: a new private university momentarily dubbed as Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT) will be built near to the Graphisoft Park in Óbuda (Aquincum) concentrating on competitive information-/biotechnology (mainly bioinformatics) education and entrepreneurship.
The main instigator of the project is Gábor Bojár, founder and CEO of the most successful Hungarian software company, Graphisoft.
“The company aims to become the global leader in building-architectural software solutions, hence it must found the training of professionals on a business basis, Bojar said. The new school is to be opened in 2010.”
Mr. Bojár convinced world-class Hungarian scientists and businessmen like Wolf-prize winner discrete mathematician and computer scientist LászlóLovász, inventor and architecture professor Ernő Rubik, former Office guru, intentionalprogrammer and space tourist Simonyi Charles and scale-free network theorist Albert-LászlóBarabási amongst others to back the idea of a profit-oriented technology university sustained by the market itself.
It’s not too hard to recognize some particular Silicon Valley virtues or models behind the idea of an university like AIT let’s just think about the innovative environment at Stanford, intellectual and entrepreneurial home of the HP, Sun Microsystems and Google founders. What I have in mind here concerning the biotechnology part is The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) which is ‘a cooperative effort between the state of California, the University of California campuses at Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, and industry and venture capital partners’.
Following Matt Cutts’s tweet I am now writing my blog post using the CrossOver Chromium browser which is a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser. Google Chrome (Windows-only so far) is built with open source code from Chromium that means I have now a functional Google Chrome clone under Leopard on my MacBook. This is almost the same experience just like 2 weeks ago. I can use the omnibox, the new home tab and the very clever tab arhictecture amongst others but first of all the browser is now more or less integrated into my customized OS X environment and that is a big advantage. There are of course, inconveniences like crashes and problems with the shortcuts due to the Windows – Mac crossover solutions (which can be modestly modified with Preferences).
“I’m basically trying to solve the problem that startups have in hiring the right people. A lot of it has to do with marketing (it’s hard for startups to get prominence over big named companies particularly in university settings), but also fit.“
And that is a very nice endeavour indeed!
I found 1 job description by typing “biologist‘ into the search field although manually I found a bit more mostly in the protein scene. Bioinformatician? Guess what. Hopefully the numbers will grow.
The concept of decellularizing complex organs in cadavers and reseeding the remaining matrix structure with differentiated, stem or progenitor cells, growing in a bioreactor and transplanting back to the organism could turn out to be a real technological shortcut in the field of tissue engineering. It is not a brand new story on the web, but it is quite new in science and when I heard Doris Taylor at the Understanding Aging Conference talking on that….well I was really amazed.
Dr. Taylor not only showed the pictures of a complete decellularized rat heart matrix, but in fact they did it on a whole rat framework. So the obvious question is whether the technique could be extended to complete human cadavers (imagine the bone and the bone marrow situation) and if yes, when and how? I am sure if there were a useful clinical near term application of this type of tissue engineering, people would include that option too into their testaments.
And now a pop video on the topic and the abstract:
What we do:
Halcyon Molecular is developing an ultra-low-cost DNA sequencing technology. Our single molecule approach does not require PCR amplification and will allow for megabase read lengths with simultaneous determination of methylation pattern. We aim to sequence entire human genomes de novo for well under the “holy grail” cost-to-consumer of $1000.
I argued many times here that biology based biotechnology is the next information technology but in order to do so, biotech should harness good IT patterns and mimic its massive computing practices to handle the enormous amount of constantly accumulating data. Often this trend could be summarized in a simple way: keep your eye on Google and conduct thought experiments in advance in which science is done in a Googleplex like environment in terms of the computing & financial resources and algorithm heavy engineering culture. Use Python and learn cluster computing and MapReduce. With the expected launch of the massive scientific dataset hosting Google service – nicknamed Palimpsest – this year finally a direct interface between scientists and Googlers emerges and hopefully opens up possibilities for scientists to cooperate with Google. (Remember my joke on Google BioLabs back in 2006)? I get emails from biologists, bioinformaticians asking me how to be hired by Google ever since then. As I tweeted yesterday: I growingly have the impression that “being ambitious” today = ‘worked, is currently working, is going to work at/for Google’ Taking Google’s inter-industrial power into consideration I see a real chance that some day the “Google of Biotechnology” title goes not to a startup yet to be emerged, not to Genentech or to 23andMe but……to Google itself. No kidding here. Fortunately Google’s model is “to build a killer app then monetize it later” says Andy Rubin, the man behind Google’s Android mobile software in the July issue of Wired so scientists working for the big G probably won’t have to worry about turning their scientific killer app into an instant cash machine.
And now in the very issue of Wired magazine (not online yet ) there is an exciting cover story on the same pattern I talked about concerning the life sciences but in the broader context of every kind of science with the provocative, Fukuyama-like title The End of Science. There is a witty and short essay from editor-in-chief Chris Anderson entitled The End of Theory followed by examples of the ‘new science’ like the The Large Hadron Collider expected to generate 10 petabytes if data/second, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey heaven catalog maker accumulating 25 terrabytes of data so far, the skeleton scanning project of Sharmila Majumdar and the Many Eyes project “where users can share their own dynamic, interactive representations of big data”.
For many people around the globe, Chris Anderson is a freeconomist & the author of a popular airport book but fewer people are aware that he was actually trained as a (quantum) physicist and even worked at Los Alamos Read the rest of this entry »
Even tech people in Silicon Valley need to join their powerful forces and sources when it is about aging related neurodegenerative diseases and help research and the clinic.
It’s my first real encounter with a situation in which the officials of the state of California are clearly against innovation for financial reasons obvious enough (is enough):
Wired.com has obtained a copy of the cease-and-desist letter sent to Navigenics by the state of California’s Public Health Department from a company spokesperson.
The letter’s strongest wording is reserved for another section of the law, Business and Professions Code Section 1288, which requires a doctor’s note for all laboratory tests, unless, like pregnancy tests, they are exempt from that law.
“Genetic tests are NOT exempt,” the letter reads. “As such, the test must be ordered by a physician or surgeon.”Read the rest of this entry »
It’s official: The California Department of Public Health wants practicing physicians (many of them prehistorically, sorry, traditionally trained) to be the patres familias in issues between personal genetic test takers and direct-to-consumer personal genetic testing start-ups while declining the test takers’ right to get familiar with their own genetic makeup and risks by their own. Calif. cracks down on 13 genetic testing startups
California health regulators have demanded that 13 direct-to-consumer genetic testing startups halt sales in the state until they prove they meet state standards. All the companies have two weeks to demonstrate to regulators that their laboratories are certified by the state and federal governments, said department spokeswoman Lea Brooks. The startups also must show the tests they are selling California residents have been ordered by a doctor as required by state law.
The Wall Street Journal Patent Board Biotechnology Scorecard was published this week in which biotech companies & private research firms are grouped by their Patent Board science strength ranking “which is based on the scale, quality, impact, and nearness to core science of a company’s patent-based intellectual property”.
What I found interesting at the first sight is Geron‘s nice position and the lack of Genentech. Also take a look on the charts and compare, say Illumina and Affymetrix or the research intensity/innovation cycle ratio in case of the same company.
Says my source, San Diego biased marketing expert Rick Cook in an in medias res email:
“Three of the top 10 science-based researchers, according to the rankings, are based in San Diego. Several other San Diego companies fall outside the top 10. Nanogen, one of my clients, made the rankings. What’s particularly interesting about Nanogen — who competes against #1-ranked Roche — is that the company has by far the lowest market cap (just over $28 million) represented in the rankings. In fact, if you divide patents issued by market cap, which could be used as a proxy for size, Nanogen ranks number one — dollar-for-dollar the most innovative company on the list.”
Internet celebrities are not celebrities in a sense that you can easily communicate with them on services like Twitter (assuming the services are not down). There’s no such thing as an internet bodyguard except some firewalls in Windows. So this day I found Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder tweeting this:
Also a good presentation by Linda Avey, other co-founder, for instance on data privacy and service security:“We take the security of our customers’ data to the highest degree…you guys (Googlers) are very much of the same mind..One of our leading engineers is probably the most paranoid man we’ve ever meet and he is the perfect guy for that.
Here are my screenshots on the genetic puzzle on the Google triumvirate presented by Anne Wojcicki:
“This paper outlines prospects for applying the emerging techniques of synthetic biology to the field of anatomy, with the aim of programming cells to organize themselves into specific, novel arrangements, structures and tissues. There are two main reasons why developing this hybrid discipline – synthetic morphology – would be useful. The first is that having a way to engineer self-constructing assemblies of cells would provide a powerful means of tissue engineering for clinical use in surgery and regenerative medicine. The second is that construction of simple novel systems according to theories of morphogenesis gained from study of real embryos will provide a means of testing those theories rigorously, something that is very difficult to do by manipulation of complex embryos. This paper sets out the engineering requirements for synthetic morphology, which include the development of a library of sensor modules, regulatory modules and effector modules that can be connected functionally within cells. A substantial number of sensor and regulatory modules already exist and this paper argues that some potential effector modules have already been identified. The necessary library may therefore be within reach. The paper ends by suggesting a set of challenges, ranging from simple to complex, the achievement of which would provide valuable proofs of concept.”
Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe.
“23andWe marks a new approach to genetics research. By directly involving 23andMe customers in the company’s research projects, the goal is to conduct large-scale studies powered by a web-based community of diverse individuals who are willing to share information (on a confidential basis) about their health and other personal traits.”
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder is a very interesting man. His story is the number one immigrant success story in the USA today, I dare say. I have 2 Brin videos to show you today:
In the first one, Sergey demonstrates mobility in 2000 in 3 ways with his ‘faint accent that is no longer identifiably Russian’ (I really like this presentation as you can learn many things on how to give and not to give a talk):
In the second video Sergey speaks in his native language, Russian but with a “huuuge american accent” as a Russian colleague of mine wrote to me in an email.Read the rest of this entry »
A burning question for real: What is (or how to set up) the Google Health status/condition of deanimated, frozen people, like Dr. Steven P. Rievman:
Rievman, 64, who co-founded the Cryonics Society of South Florida in the 1960s, now resides in a deep-freeze capsule at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, awaiting the day when medical science can ”re-animate” him and cure his ills: lupus and Type I diabetes, which afflicted him starting at age 17. Read the rest of this entry »
The O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp is a nice option for the emerging personalized genomics companies or any web-related biotech startups to communicate and cooperate with alpha geeks and early technology adopters.
The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year’s Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who’ve already been successful.Read the rest of this entry »
Here is a little timeline from a liveblogger for the Google Factory Tour of Search (05/19/08) including the official launch presentation of Google Health – time frame 83:35/1:23:35 – 90:45/1:30:45 -, by dr. Roni Zeiger, Google Health product manager who truly believes – & he is probably right – “that the most interesting, innovative services of Google Health are the ones that we haven’t seen or even thought of yet.”
So watch “the pivotal moment of the history of healthcare” using the words of Stephen Suffin, corporate chief medical officer from Quest Diagnostics.
People expect usually too much from Google even in the sectors, like biotechnology or medicine where Google is not native. For me the recent Google Health – which is basically an embryonic online medical health record system for users with a Gmail Account in the USA – seems to be rather about just catching up with the past than doing the future right now. That is not a criticism but rather a description. Storing/exchanging/updating individual medical records digitally is a “must-have-done-by-now” for the geeks, early technological adopters as the technology long exists, while it is still far-far away concerning current medical practices.
Google Health is really forward thinking in the way that it facilitates medical consumers/patients to upload their medical profile/conditions in the lack of institutional data thereby getting more familiar with everything health related. But Google Health is for the more or less healthy/mainstream and not for the seriously ill: in its recent form it cannot help to find a clinical trial for a rare disease, say.
For the moment, Google Health looks like a charity operation. The company won’t serve ads on the site (presumably to avoid the appearance of impropriety); nor does it plan on selling data, which would likely be extremely lucrative.
Instead, the company is focused on building out the service and growing market share. That’s a good thing, say industry watchers, because it could take years before the market matures and consumers are ready for the digital health revolution.
Yep, it is still too early and building a critical mass is a crucial thing. It is so early that most of the angles remain hidden in obligatory posts on Google Health. I suggest to read the detailed & insightful comments, for instance this one at TechCrunch by Fred Neil:Read the rest of this entry »
Nature Biotechnology is the (peer review) journal for me: it’s geeky, fresh and it takes into account more than just one point-of-view, that of the scientist-academist’s: technology & business are hand in hands also. (Recommending Nat Biotech makes a niche sense here while recommending Nature, which is actually the only science journal I’m reading issue by issue is hm… too obvious)
But Nature Biotech goes as far as citing even a non peer review journal – I am also prettyfamiliar with – called Wired. So my puzzle is /please use your contextual knowledge first & just then your typing skills while thinking of an answer/: which Wired article is cited in a March Nature Biotech News and Views article (very good, by the way) named Synthetic genomes brought closer to life by Robert A Holt amongst strict science articles. Don’t think too high, it’s rather a reflection.
“That’s the problem these days,” 2K says. “Nobody wants to do work hard. Everybody wants easy. In my days, we knew what heavy lifting was. I had to carry rocks to my cave in the office. We carried rocks to write on. We wrote our code with a hammer and a chisel. That’s not software kid. That’s hardware.”Read the rest of this entry »
Along the lines of self-motivated employees, I asked a manager whether most of their new products came from the individual employees or from management. He expressed the conviction that most innovation in most companies comes from individual employees. Where management can help is in finding effective places to fit new features into the organization and product line.
Google found that releasing too many products prevented the public from learning about them and adopting them. Adding a feature to an existing product such as Gmail or Blogger could mean that millions of people adopt it, whereas releasing it as a stand-along product might limit adoption to a few thousand.
The question for me is always how these experiences can be compared and applied to the biotech industry, in this case I am curious how biotechnological innovation is going in the profit sector outside academia. So if you are working at a biotech startup or at a big pharma please share us your opinion (anonymously if you like) in the comments on the nature of innovation at your company!
Malcolm Gladwell has a nice, but a bit Microsoft heavy essay on scientific/technological multiples, ie. the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery in New Yorker: In the Air
Gladwell argues that it is always misleading to apply the paradigm of artistic invention to scientific/technological invention and he is probably right.
Two sections just for your appetite:
“This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.”
