Why the Dyna-Vision G1 Android Telemedicine App can only be used by licensed physicians???

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…

Practical DNA: Hugh Rienhoff’s got a story to tell

After the Nature cover article Hugh Rienhoff and the story of My Daughter’s DNA is now covered by Wired magazine. I wrote about Hugh (a fellow SciFoo Camper) as an example of any future bioDIY effort in The conditions of a mass biotech DIY movement and now the Wired piece gives us more context and details…

HealthMap & data fusion: detailed Google Tech Talks intro

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…

Life extension people & session at SciFoo 2008, Googleplex!

Last year I was probably the only SciFoo Camper with an explicit life extension commitment. I suggested & held a session which was related a bit to partial immortalization but was rather about the systems biology perspective in general, illustrated with some examples. So throughout the terrific SciFoo Camp 2007 life extension as a conversation…

The decellularized matrix hack: skipping many steps in tissue engineering

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,…

UCSF Memory & Aging Center channel on YouTube & ‘Fight for Mike’

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. UCSF Memory and Aging Center channel on YouTube  Om Malik: A Personal Note: Pause & Read via John Battelle  

Innovation stop: “All they’ve done is created an extra billing event for the doctor”

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 Science, Alexis Madrigal, upcoming BioBarCamper: Exclusive: DNA Tester Reveals Cease-and-Desist Letter Wired.com has obtained a copy of the cease-and-desist letter sent to Navigenics by the state…

Future stop: California health officials against personal genetics risk-takers

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.…

CT and PET body scans on the iPhone by MIMvista at WWDC

MIMvista Corp. is a third party software provider for PET and PET/CT display. Go SciPhone, go! source: Gizmodo Live Coverage

What path would you follow: Shumway or Barnard?

Monya Baker has an excellent Q&A with the authors of the recent Nature Insight: Regenerative Medicine over at The Niche blog. Ken Chien, the author of Regenerative medicine and human models of human disease – see earlier post – recalls the paradigmatic story of heart transplantation and the 2 main surgeons behind, Norman Shumway and…

23andWe follows 23andMe: First generation of Consumer-Enabled Research

Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe. From BusinessWire: “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…

Biomedical informatics and the NIH, in the Googleplex

“I feel like I am talking to an empty room. Why do I feel like I am talking to an empty room?” starts Michael Marron his Google Tech Talk on NIH and the computational infrastructure for biomedical research rather unfortunately. (I remember that room.)

Personal genetics test-takers are future risk-takers

A good introduction in Nature on the risks and advantages of letting people know their genetic risk information via personal genetics services. I do hope that the test-takers will finally become the risk overtakers. Helen Pearson: Genetic testing for everyone Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a rapidly growing market — the past year has seen the…

What is the Google Health condition of deanimated, frozen people?

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…

Google Health Troubleshooting: User-entered sudden death

What is the status of death according to Google Health? Is it a condition? How many types of deaths there are according to GH? I found 2: What is the status of dead people according to Google Health? Who decides? May I kill myself on Google Health? Why not? Is it reversible?

How can Google Health help to homeless people?

Homeless people without proper medical insurance are the insignificant others for the health care system. Wikipedia says but maybe it is obvious enough for everybody: “Health care for the homeless is a major public health challenge. Homeless people are more likely to suffer injuries and medical problems from their lifestyle on the street, which includes…

Meet Dr. Google Health: Roni Zeiger, right out of Stanford!

Roni F. Zeiger, MD (watch his presentation), Google Health product manager, whose PubMed profile (if he really is the very same person) gives us a very strong reason why he was hired by Google for this job (he joined Google in 2006). The 38-year-old, who still sees patients some evenings and weekends at a nearby…

Google Factory Tour of Health: watch the pivotal moment!

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…

Late Google Health: catching up with the past, first!

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…

A bit of history: The official launch of Google Health, 19/05/08

I am between 2 experiments in the lab, but get back to the launch of Google Health later. Here is one screenshot of my Google Health profile. Twitter: Scott Beale Google Blogoscoped: Google Factory Tour: Google Health Launched Update: Late Google Health: catching up with the past, first!

How to predict the future via Twitter: Google invests in Navigenics

Wow, I guess it’s time for me to move into the stock market business! Here’s the story via David Bradley’s tweet: Julie Kent, Search Engine Journal, April 21st, 2008: Google Wants to Index Genetic Information, Invests in Second DNA Start-Up In 2007, Google made headlines when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a genetic screening…

Leigh syndrome – where are those mitochondria replacement therapies?

Dear Sir: I came across your blog after reading Stanley Bing’s recent article in Fortune Magazine. I will try to be brief. I have a 4 year old son who was diagnosed 1.5 years ago with a form of Leigh’s disease; one of the most devastating forms of mitochondrial disease. While he is receiving care…

Michael Kingsley on competitive, bitter, boomer longevity

Michael Kingsley – diagnosed with Parkinson disease at the age 42 – wrote an utterly fatalist, sad&straight and death conscious essay entitled Mine Is Longer than Yours on the last boomer game he calls competitive longevity published in the New Yorker. This piece is the dark counterpart of the recent Wired Kurzweil coverage on Mr.…

Kurzweil follow-up in life extension exhausted Wired

Last year I approached a powerful Wired editor with the following story pitch: “A full and deep but cool report on the current (scientific) life extension technologies, persons, battles, camps, grants, problems, perspectives.” His reply was a diplomatic and definite naysaying: “Thanks for the idea. Alas, we’ve done *way* too many stories on life-extension over…

Biotech firm funded by Life Extension Foundation to push regmed therapies

Press release: “We at Life Extension Foundation are pleased to help finance BioTime‘s entry into the field of regenerative medicine. We believe that one of the most important applications of embryonic stem cell technology is the slowing and reversing of aging and age-related disease.

The second goal of 23andMe: using customer’s real health data later

Esther Dyson‘s honest post on getting the genotype-health risk correlation statistics right on The Spittoon blog: What You Can Do for 23andMe (and Future Generations) To learn more, researchers need to collect thousands of genetic profiles – and the health data connected with each of them – to find correlations between the two. That leads…

Healthy life extension is not 1 out of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges…

…that can be realistically met, most of them early in this century according to the Committee on Grand Challenges for Engineering with members such as Larry Page, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Robert Langer and …lifestyle life extensionist, nanovisionary Ray Kurzweil. There is a challenge though called Engineer better medicines and the essay behind looks as…

Xoogler goes biotech

I found this quote in John Battelle’s blog from a recent CNET article on ex-Googlers by Stephanie Olsen, but I’d like to repeat it just with a different emphasis as I found all the other parts interesting for the biotech community except the one sentence bolded by Battelle. So I bolded those parts:

9 year old stem cell trial pioneer dies in Batten disease

This is exactly the type of clinical trial news that should be taken extremely carefully with all due respect and grief. A girl enrolled in a stem-cell trial for a fatal disease has died. In January, the nine-year-old received a brain transplant of neural stem cells derived from fetal tissue. She was one of six…

Nature Editor-in-Chief’s changed mind on enhancement drugs for healthy people

Philip Campbell, the open editor-in-chief of Nature was asked by John Brockman under the cover of the 2008 Edge Annual Question: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY? Campbell writes in his thoughtful answer: “I’ve changed my mind about the use of enhancement drugs by healthy people. A year ago, if asked, I’d have…

inF.A.Q. for 23andMe: what if I have mitochondrial DNA from Pa?

Have you ever asked any important but infrequently asked questions? Have you ever heard about the first personal genome service by the biotech startup 23andMe? Here is an inF.A.Q. addressed to this company: According to the cool 23andMe genetics educator: According to the peer review literature this is not necessarily the case and sometimes (rarely…

The life extension bonus effect of personal genome services: +10 years?

After all, what customers can really expect of personal genome services that companies like 23andMe can offer beyond knowing whether they have a perfect pitch or not? If the service can really help in minimizing the risk of life threatening diseases, than the real expectation is to live longer by using those personalized/commercialized genome data.…

Spit a big in a tube, search with Genome Explorer: the 23andMe way

Detailed article in the New York Times on the early experience of decoding the genetic code and interpreting the customers’ DNA via the service of 23andMe. The buzz name of the project: personalized genetics/genomics. Although other companies are mentioned briefly, the focus is clearly on 23andMe. The basics: get rid of a thousand bucks (sorry,…

Venter on the Web 2.0 summit, Mayer on Google Health and petabytes

The ongoing mainstream Web 2.0 summit has a little coverage on health and biomedicine too: an upcoming conversation with genomics maverick, uncovered Craig Venter and a past presentation by Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President for Search Products & User Experience, on health information. Sarah Milstein says: “They’re also interested in helping you store and access…

Bill Dye’s hope for an early regenerative medicine therapy! Please help.

Bill Dye has a serious muscle-tendon damage and is looking for an experimental regenerative medicine therapy (stem cells or tissue engineering or both) after 2 years and many surgical interventions. If any out of the expert readers of this blog can help or knows someone, who can help, please do comment or email Mr. Bill…

Biomarkers of aging conference in New York City

In order to slow the progress of aging and prevent age-related disease (which is not the same as figuring out a robust engineering plan for unlimited healthy life extension) biological measures (biomarkers) of aging or disease mechanisms are needed that anticipate clinical disease and are sensitive to functional organism aging. The American Federation for Aging…

SENS3: Stephen Coles on the secrets of supercentenarians (slides)

A supercentenarian is anyone with the chronological age of 110 years or older. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group kindly sent me his slides of the presentation he held last week on SENS3 entitled the Secrets of the oldest old and he gave a permission to publish these slides…

SENS3 program: John Schloendorn: Medical bioremediation

SENS3 is coming, so it’s time to take a closer look at the agenda. Here is my first pick: Friday 7th September, Session 6 14:20 John Schloendorn Tempe, USA Medical bioremediation J. Schloendorn, M. Hamalainen, S.K. Kemmish, L. Jiang, J. Rebo, B. Turner, B.E. Rittmann Center for Environmental Biotechnology, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University,…

Dean Kamen’s 5 min TED talk on the robotic arm project

When Anna and me are looking for something interesting, but not too lengthy and detailed quality video content on the web our frequent destination is TED Talks. These videos are ideal during a lunch, or just before bedtime. In the newest TED sequence inventor Dean Kamen previews the extraordinary prosthetic arm his team is developing.…

Nature Clinical Practice audio articles: keeping busy doctors updated

Let’s give a chance to audio articles, a new initiative being trialed by Nature Clinical Practice. “These are FREE full-text audio versions of printed content from the March 2007 issue of Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology. The aim of the Nature Clinical Practice journals is ‘to translate the latest findings into clinical practice’ by highlighting important…