10 Things In Life Sciences to Read this Weekend đź’Š

Amazon's secret health care team, Michael Phelps joins an Australian healthcare company and other interesting reads for the weekend.

July's healthcare funding and deals round-up will be sent via a special newsletter early next week.

Genetic testing is all the rage in biopharma these days, with players ranging from pharma giants to dozens of upstarts getting into the genomics game. One of the most-watched players in recent years has been Grail, an ambitious Silicon Valley firm working on "liquid biopsy" technology that could, theoretically, be used to test for early signs of cancer in through a simple blood draw. But getting such a product to market will require expansive clinical testing—testing that will produce mountains of genomic data. And that data needs to be stored somewhere. Enter: Amazon, which CNBC reports invested in Grail in the hopes that its cloud web services could eventually become a repository for all this information

The stealth team called 1492, which is headquartered in Seattle, is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to two people familiar. Areas of exploration include a platform for electronic medical record data, telemedicine and health apps for existing devices like the Amazon Echo. Amazon has become increasingly interested in exploring new business in healthcare. For example, Amazon has another unit exploring pharmacy business.

With cancer immunotherapy, you win some—and you lose some. Merck and rival Bristol-Myers Squibb, the first companies to win drug approvals for a new class of cancer immunotherapy drugs called "checkpoint inhibitors," have been trading milestone victories and setbacks. The latest reversal of fortunes came on Monday, when it was revealed that Merck's star drug Keytruda didn't improve overall survival rates in head and neck cancers (a cancer type where Bristol-Myers' Opdivo did show a survival benefit). Merck shares fell modestly while BMS' stock gained modestly on the news. However, in other cancers—including the massive lung cancer market—Keytruda has produced far more impressive clinical results (and received more FDA approvals) than Opdivo has, highlighting the topsy-turvy nature of cancer immunotherapy.

Helix spun out of San Diego-based Illumina, the $20 billion genomics giant whose super-computers sequence about 90 percent of the world’s DNA data. Its goal? To take the sequencing tech used by researchers and doctors and open it up to consumers in a digital marketplace built on DNA. Helix will sequence your genes for $80 and lure app developers to sell you access to different parts of it.

A new wave of pharmaceutical industry mergers may be on the horizon, in part driven by the $1.3 trillion in overseas cash that U.S. corporations currently hold. If policymakers provide a tax holiday on repatriation of these funds, some experts say that U.S. pharmaceutical companies would be flush with cash and could likely spend a meaningful portion of this windfall on mergers

Machine learning-based decision support systems are poised to transform medical care but can be complicated by physician over-reliance on technology, the intrinsic uncertainty of medical science, and a "black box" approach to providing answers.

Lawyers hope to do to opioid makers what they did to big tobacco. Mike Moore, a pioneer of the cigarette litigation of the 1990s, is encouraging states to sue drug companies over the painkiller epidemic, alleging they helped spark an addiction crisis by misrepresenting the benefits and addiction risks of opioid painkillers. He has been collaborating with Ohio Attorney General Michael DeWine, with other elected government attorneys, and with other trial lawyers to seek lift-off of suits against painkiller makers and distributors.

FDA has made reforming the mobile health and digital health application certification process a key priority and is launching a new optional pre-certification program toward that end. "FDA's traditional approach to moderate and higher-risk, hardware-based medical devices is not well suited for the faster and iterative design, development, and validation used for software products," the agency writes in an update.

Funding cuts to key U.S. programs that support medicine and treatment are coming. And with a booming African population and drug-resistant strains on the rise, the future is grim. The entire world seems on tenterhooks, awaiting the final decision on the 2018 U.S. government budget, unlikely to be determined before late September.

MediBio is taking an objective approach toward mental health. The company has developed a test using biomarkers to help diagnose depression, chronic stress and other disorders, utilizing circadian rhythm, sleep and blood pressure measurements. Studies show between 86–95 percent accuracy of diagnosis. MediBio expects to submit for 510(K) approval with the FDA in the second quarter of 2018.

Thank You!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear which specific topics or sections you would like to know more about and in general, if you have any suggestions, please do write to me at: [email protected]

As a parting note, not related to healthcare, but watch this short video. The world needs more people who can teach like this guy!