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Category: health

Silicon Valley’s newest valley member; wonder if Google or eBay will send a “Welcome Basket” to the FDA?

Helmy Eltoukhy’s company is on a roll. The start-up is a leading contender in the crowded field of firms working on “liquid biopsy” tests that aim to be able to tell in a single blood draw whether a person has cancer.

Venture investors are backing Guardant Health to the tune of nearly $200 million. Leading medical centers are testing its technology. And earlier this month, it presented promising data on how well its screening tool, which works by scanning for tiny DNA fragments shed by dying tumor cells, worked on an initial group of 10,000 patients with late-stage cancers.

Just one thing is holding the company back: Guardant Health has yet to get approval from Food and Drug Administration.

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Russia’s ongoing nuclear fallout challenges.

MUSLYUMOVO, Russia (AP) — At first glance, Gilani Dambaev looks like a healthy 60-year-old man and the river flowing past his rural family home appears pristine. But Dambaev is riddled with diseases that his doctors link to a lifetime’s exposure to excessive radiation, and the Geiger counter beeps loudly as a reporter strolls down to the muddy riverbank.

Some 50 kilometers (30 miles) upstream from Dambaev’s crumbling village lies Mayak, a nuclear complex that has been responsible for at least two of the country’s biggest radioactive accidents. Worse, environmentalists say, is the facility’s decades-old record of using the Arctic-bound waters of the Techa River to dump waste from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, hundreds of tons of which is imported annually from neighboring nations.

The results can be felt in every aching household along the Techa, where doctors record rates of chromosomal abnormalities, birth defects and cancers vastly higher than the Russian average — and citizens such as Dambaev are left to rue the government’s failure over four decades to admit the danger.

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Nice; however, I see also 3D printing along with machine learning being part of any cosmetic procedures and surgeries.

With an ever-increasing volume of electronic data being collected by the healthcare system, researchers are exploring the use of machine learning—a subfield of artificial intelligence—to improve medical care and patient outcomes. An overview of machine learning and some of the ways it could contribute to advancements in plastic surgery are presented in a special topic article in the May issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

“Machine learning has the potential to become a powerful tool in plastic surgery, allowing surgeons to harness complex clinical data to help guide key clinical decision-making,” write Dr. Jonathan Kanevsky of McGill University, Montreal, and colleagues. They highlight some key areas in which machine learning and “Big Data” could contribute to progress in plastic and reconstructive surgery.

Machine Learning Shows Promise in Plastic Surgery Research and Practice

Machine learning analyzes historical data to develop algorithms capable of knowledge acquisition. Dr. Kanevsky and coauthors write, “Machine learning has already been applied, with great success, to process large amounts of complex data in medicine and surgery.” Projects with healthcare applications include the IBM Watson Health cognitive computing system and the American College of Surgeons’ National Surgical Quality Improvement Program.

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Lookout Silicon Valley — FDA is here. I do suggest tech companies working on technologies that enhances or alters any bio living things to ensure that your certifications, processes are well defined and govern, and in some cases the engineers, etc. will need some level of a medical background and certifications as well. Why many have stated that future engineers and technologists will need a bio background through education, etc.

Helmy Eltoukhy’s company is on a roll. The start-up is a leading contender in the crowded field of firms working on “liquid biopsy” tests that aim to be able to tell in a single blood draw whether a person has cancer.

Venture investors are backing Guardant Health to the tune of nearly $200 million. Leading medical centers are testing its technology. And earlier this month, it presented promising data on how well its screening tool, which works by scanning for tiny DNA fragments shed by dying tumor cells, worked on an initial group of 10,000 patients with late-stage cancers.

Just one thing is holding the company back: Guardant Health has yet to get approval from Food and Drug Administration.

Read more

Blockchaining coming to healthcare digital services.

Blockchain and digital health services could be a perfect match for each other across a variety of applications. From distributed interoperable health records to proof of adherence for medication, the healthcare industry is ripe for digital innovation. More generally, technology is a hyper-deflationary force, and this could be particularly effective in delivering quality health care through more effective channels such as mobile apps.

Investments in the digital health space have increased significantly in the past two years. This is largely possible because of improved low-power sensors and user-friendly cloud platforms that interface with those hardware devices. The Rock Health Funding Database shows a $4.5 billion increase in venture funding in digital health from 2014 to 2015.

Smart contract technology is built on top of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and is a hallmark of “Bitcoin 2.0” platforms. Blockchain is the fundamental infrastructure needed for Bitcoin transactions to work, and an enabling technology for the next generation of asset-based platforms.

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Smell what you view.

Practically every product I’ve ever reviewed has had to pass some kind of smell test.

But none more so than Cyrano, a new cylindrical shaped three-inch tall consumer electronics gadget that is being marketed as a “digital scent speaker.” I’ve been sniffing around it for a few days. It is now available in limited quantities on preorder.

What exactly is a digital scent speaker? Think glorified high tech equivalent of an air freshener or candle, only you can more easily switch fragrances or quickly turn smells on or off. And the company behind Cyrano, Cambridge, MA.-based Vapor Communications, has more ambitious aspirations for the product—for use in storytelling, gaming and most importantly, health and wellness.

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We definitely need precision medicine. If you don’t believe it is worth that; then I have a few widows & widowers who you should speak to; I have parents that you should speak with; I have a list of sisters & brothers that you should speak with; and I have many many friends (including me) that you should speak with about how we miss those we love because things like precision medicine wasn’t available and could have saved their lives.

Precision medicine is the theme for the 10th annual symposium of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Nano Biotechnology, Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9 a.m. in the Owens Auditorium at the School of Medicine. This year’s event is cohosted by Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative (also known as Hopkins in Health) and features several in Health affiliated speakers.

By developing treatments that overcome the limitations of the one-size-fits-all mindset, precision medicine will more effectively prevent and thwart disease. Driven by data provided from sources such as electronic medical records, public health investigations, clinical studies, and from patients themselves through new point-of-care assays, wearable sensors and smartphone apps, precision medicine will become the gold standard of care in the not-so-distant future. Before long, we will be able to treat and also prevent diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and cancer with regimes that are tailor-made for the individual.

Hopkins in Health is a signature initiative of Johns Hopkins University’s $4.5 billion Rising to the Challenge campaign is a collaboration among three institutions: the University, the Johns Hopkins Health System, and the Applied Physics Laboratory. These in Health researchers combine clinical, genetic, lifestyle, and other data sources to create innovative tools intended to improve decision-making in the prevention and treatment of a range of conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and infectious disease. The goal is to “provide the right care to the right person at the right time.”

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Lesson in Vitamin D.

Low levels of vitamin D in black teens correlates with low activity of a major mechanism for controlling gene expression that may increase their risk of cancer and other disease, researchers report.

Their study measured vitamin D levels as well as levels of global DNA methylation in 454 healthy individuals age 14–18. In this group, 99 percent of the white teens had adequate vitamin D levels, 66 percent of the black teens were vitamin D-deficient and all the black teens had lower levels of methylation compared to their white peers, said Dr. Haidong Zhu, molecular geneticist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

When they looked at another group of 58 young black individuals also with low vitamin D and methylation levels who received varying doses of vitamin D supplements for 16 weeks, they found a dose response: the more vitamin D received, the higher the methylation activity, said Zhu, corresponding author of the study in the journal PLOS ONE.

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Hmmm; I do know for many there is a set of genetic mutations that seem to sit dormat and eventually triggered by environment conditions.

(Reuters Health) — The risk of some childhood cancers might vary depending on where a child’s mother was born, a new study suggests.

For example, some brain and kidney cancers occurred less often in children whose Hispanic mothers were born outside the U.S. than in youngsters whose Hispanic or white mothers were born in the U.S., researchers found.

However, the Hispanic children had a higher risk of certain blood cancers regardless of where their mothers were born.

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