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Eighty-two percent of respondents reported turning to medical professionals for health information, while 51% said they consult their friends, family or significant others.
The survey also found that 85% of women who use the Internet have researched women’s health issues online, while nearly two out of three women who use the Internet have researched birth control options online.
Results are based on a survey of 921 women ages 18 to 44.
To the numerous list of health innovations the Wii can do, we add in improving surgery performance by 50%.
The BBC reports that researchers at the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center studied eight surgeon trainees who trained for an hour on a Wii before performing 50% better on a virtual surgery simulator. Their scores excelled in the areas of tool control and overall performance as compared to those who did not.
The game in question is called Marble Mania, which involves moving a marble through a 3D maze.
To be fair, the researchers should pit these “Wii-surgeons” against those who meditate, visualize, pray, or perform hand exercise before surgery.
In any case, the researchers claim that the fine movement of a ball through a maze are complementary to skills which would help a surgeon in surgery. They also suggested that perhaps spending $250 for a surgery prep device is a great alternative for poorer countries to train their surgeons as compared to buying an expensive surgery virtual simulator.
Read more on: Health Games, Medutainment, Tech
I bring a challenge to glucometer makers, make a meter that is so simple to use that a patient does not need instructions prior to using it. (Glucometer is a trademarked brand of the Bayer Company but is also used generically to refer to all types of blood glucose meters).
The problem.
Your current meter comes in 4 parts. The meters are designed to be smaller but after you add all four parts up and put it into the carrying case, it’s not so small after all. The parts are: The meter, the test strips, the lancet device and the needles (or lancet). Why can’t you make all these things into one device? Do you not realize how hard it is to explain to a 75 year old patient how to take his blood sugar? He has to first clean his hands. Load the needle into the lancet device. Poke himself with the needle. Put the test strip into the meter. Align his fingers into the strip and draw up enough blood.
PEOPLE DON’T TEST REGULARLY BECAUSE IT’S TOO DIFFICULT TO!
I don’t understand the marketing reasoning behind such difficult testing techniques. If you only design a simpler device, you’ll have people testing them three to six times daily and you’ll get more profit!
There have been some breakthroughs on the technology of blood glucose testing. Some of which includes infra-red readings and plasma readings, and both of which are non-invasive. The later refers to a device which the patient would wear like a watch. The device draws out the plasma (the watery part of the blood) from the blood, through the skin and into the device. A laser beam is then passed through the plasma to determine the glucose content. Unfortunately, such technologies are not quite perfected yet. Historically, testing techniques that do not use whole blood (including the red blood cells part) is not an accurate measure of one’s blood glucose measure. In the plasma example, what is making the test less accurate is that as the plasma passes through your tissue and skin, it picks up more glucose/drops some off and the reading is not adequate.
To reiterate my challenge.
Make a simple device that a patient can put to their finger, press a button, and the device does the rest of the work to get the reading. This would include pricking the skin and retrieving the blood. And please….do away with the calibration business. Why does a patient need to punch in the numbers on the bottle when it could be printed on the test strip and read by the meter.
Thank for your dedication into making this device. I promise to tell all my patients (my dad included) to use it and all my contacts to recommend it. [if it's good that is]
Well, not exactly. In one of my wildest fantasy, we live in a world where humans can generate anatomical parts that stop working or have loss in accident or injuries. Norriton, PA, Tengion brings us one step closer to this fantasy. Tengion is a biotech firm focused in tissue regeneration in diseased or damaged organs. They’ve recently raised $33 million in third round funding with investors such as Deerfield Partners, Bain Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development, HealthCap, Quaker Bio Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, L Capital Partners, Horizon Technology Finance and Oxford Finance.
Currently, they’re working on regrowing bladder tissue to treat patients with spinal bifida or spinal-cord injuries. This technique was designed by Dr. Atala of Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine (IRM). You can read more about Dr. Atala’s technique here. The above picture shows Dr. Atala and what the bladder tissue that he grows look like.
As many of you still remember, we’re able to grow “simple” tissue which doesn’t have complex biological functions as in the much publicized ear on a nude mouse. So what Tengion is attempting to do is to grow complex tissue of organs which are involved in complex biological functions such as the bladder.
Biologically speaking, we know that lizards and some other animals are able to regrow limbs after they are loss. If they are able to do it, theoretically, we should be able to do it as well (I know that does sound like something out of a Spiderman comic), but I really do believe that to be true someday. Cell growth are stimulated by the proper hormones and stimulant being released. Some examples have been seen in the regrowth nervous tissues in which cells know where they are suppose to be and they migrate there. It is not too far to see that if could potentially grow another arm if it is loss.
Read more about Tengion here.
Sorry for the pun. Bioheart, Inc is a biotech startup out of Sunrise, FL that specializes recovering dead heart tissue from adult stem cells. Bioheart now plans to offer 4.2 million shares at a price of $6 to $8 each (they previously had plans on a offer of $14 to $16 each). At the current price, the company would plan on making a much as $38.8 million, giving the company a value of $140 million. This is a bit slim for current standards.
Bioheart’s procedure is called MyoCell, a technique which harvest myoblasts (adult muscle stem cells) from a patient, and after a 21-day incubation period would inject them into dead myocardium (heart muscle tissue) causes by an MI/heart attack. A similar procedure was done on a small group of diabetic patients who received stem cells injected into their pancreas while made new insulin-producing beta-cells and helped with their disease (NOTE: Diabetes is more than a disease of insulin production, it also concerns the body’s non-response to insulin). On the face of it, the procedure seems like a great idea, but to date they have yet prove the procedure successful.
Repairing myocardium is not as simple as putting in new tissue. The heart is specifically designed to a certain width. By adding in new tissue one needs to ask a few crucial questions: what is to be done with the old heart tissue? will the heart just get thicker? Where will the new tissue reside? I am the first one to endorse Bioheart if their procedure is shown successful. I lost a grandmother (the only grandparent that I ever knew) to said dead myocardium. After bypass surgery, she was fine, but her old weak that had the dead myocardium could not stand the extra pressure created by the increased pressure created in the heart. Believe me, this technology is very personal to me and anyone who has a love one who have had an MI.
Bioheart to date has raided $51 million in fuding from Dan Marino Investments (the answer to your question is yes), Ascent/Meredith Asset Management, Getz Medical, Guidant, Tyco Ventures, Getz Bros., St. Jude Medical, Advent-Morro-Guayacan Private Equity Fund, Astri Group, Minnesota Bio-Med Partners, New World Angels, Presidential Capital Partners and other individuals. I can assure you that there are at least some people in that group put money into Bioheart not because they hope to make money, but rather they hope that this technology would work purely on humanitarian/personal resolve.
Konanda Parma Partners, New York-based venture-capital fund recently made public that they’re interested in raising $300 million to invest in companies that work with “underutilized” pharmaceuticals. Their idea is that they would take a drug which as already been approved (by doing this they would be saving tons of money, time and headaches by by-passing the FDA’s NDA process) and underutilized for whatever the reason, pump and money and PR into it and get the doctors to prescribe it more.
Theoretically speaking, this is a brilliant idea, not a completely new one, but a great one none the less. King Pharmaceuticals has made the idea very successful. I’ve gotten to know John Gregory, the chairman and owner, better and we both went to the same pharmacy school.
My real concern with Konanda’s plans is wondering how many pharmacist and doctors they have working for them. King Pharmaceuticals is successful because they know drugs and they know whether or not a drug is successful based upon the it’s phase 3 trials and chemical make-up. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how much money to you pour into a drug, if it’s a poor drug, it’s not going to be successful. I do wish them well, it is a great idea!
To date, Konanda has funded Validus Pharmaceuticals, which bought an antidepressant called Marplan from Oxford Pharmaceutical Services and a bipolar treatment from Shire.
Marplan (isocarboxazid) is an irreversible monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI). It was classified in 1959 by the FDA as “probably” effective after TCAs and electroshock therapy have failed. After substantial evidence by the company, in August 18, 1998, the FDA approved isocarboxazid as second-line treatment for depression. By this time, their patent on the drug has probably ran out and generic companies will be able to reproduce the drug.
MAOI drugs have a lot of interactions with other drugs and are generally not used if a patient is concurrently taking other medications. MAOI would tend to work best in otherwise healthy adults who have depression. One last note, as of August 15, 2004, the FDA requires that all antidepressants carry a Black Box warning about their safety, especially in regards to children and adolescence. (Doctors generally shy away from prescribing drugs with Black Box warnings because of their high risk factors). The FDA has promised to review this labeling as early as fall of 2006.
A blockbuster drug is define a drug that will make a $1 billion dollars or more for the company in a year. To do that, a drug will have to be a super drug for everyone, well sort of. But it will need to be able to treat the mass of the population who have that particular disease. Take Lipitor from Pfizer for example. If you have high cholesterol (dislipidemia, high LDL, high Triglycerides and low HDL) Lipitor will help you, period. There’s been a lot of talk while I was at the FDA and afterwards that the era of these big drugs are over. What else is there? Well, there’s specialized drugs that won’t treat the whole population but it will treat a special part of that population because of a certain genetic makeup.
Drugs designed to work just for you. After we’re broken the human genetic code a few years back, the time for personalized medicine isn’t too far away. There will be a time in the near future that we’ll carry around our genetic map in our wallets like our insurance card or our credit card, and the technology is being used now via DNA chip.
What this means is that the medication will be based upon your genetic makeup. Each of us reacts to certain drugs better than others (image a hand fitting into a glove, and a drug interacts with the receptors in your body a similar way).
For example, 25% of women who have breast cancer express a growth receptor called HER2. Breast cancer with this receptor expressed grow exceptionally fast compared to other types. Herceptin (trastuzumab), by Genentech, Inc, is a drug designed specifically to block the activity of the HER2 receptor. It does not work in people who don’t express the HER2 receptor, but it works exceptionally well in those people who does express it.
This type of thinking could be expanded to all disease types for the main reason that we all express different genes. And one day, we’ll be able to go to the doctor, hand them our gene chip and they’ll be able to give us the right drugs that’ll work for our bodies AND they would be able to predict future diseases we’ll get based upon our genetic code.
As predicted for months now, big Pharma is desperate for more drugs because their pipeline is not as large as it has been in recent years. Because over the last couple of years, there has been many pharmaceutical startups with interesting drug prospects both from the traditional pharmaceutical side and the biopharmaceutical side, it has been thought that there will be a huge buying frenzy among the big pharma companies looking for an easy meal. This was not necessarily the case with the Glaxo-Anacor deal this morning. In a $605 million dollar partnership, Anacor will receive $12 million in cash and $10 million in equity investment as the companies will share up to eight anti-infective drugs.
Anacor is a Palo Alto, CA -based biotech company that deals with boron-based anti-infective and anti-inflammatory agents. The first few possible drug candidates focus around treating onychomycosis (nail fungal infection) and psoriasis (skin rash undefined by other means). The company went public and August and filled for a$58 million IPO.
On Thursday, Microsoft beat Google to launch their HealthVault, a place where patients can store their health information. Patients and health professionals have been begging for something similar to this for quit a while now, but like everything else in the healthcare industry, it begs the question: is this going to work and how are they going to implement this. This is nothing to say of what Microsoft is doing, but more reflective of the healthcare industry as a whole.
A patient’s health record is spread over countless hands all restricted by the government from talking about it. One of the most sacred and scary acronyms in healthcare is HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA dictates that people who have the right to retain and handle a patient’s private health information, my keep this information from prying eyes. To most healthcare professionals, HIPAA means law suit. All this means, is how likely are these bearers of information is likely to give up these information?
One last thing that worries me, does Microsoft HealthVault (and Google Health for that matter) no who to advertise this service to? Yes, the first people to sign up are twenty and thirty-somethings here in the valley because they’re nuts like that, but they’re not the ones who have complicated health data to really worry about something like that. Microsoft really needs to go beyond the internet crowd to people who don’t typically go online (see my other article about Healthcare readers). Once they’re able to convert this crowd, the masses will follow.
Personally, as a healthcare provider, I want to see this succeed purely on the perspective of patient health. When a patient
This is bad news all around! The Justice department said today they will allow internet providers (like Comcast and Verizon) can charge users a fee for which prioritizing web traffic. It’s not how fast your connection is in general, but how fast a particular site loads.
This is very sinister because it allows them to control where you go. Let’s take for example that Google buys out Comcast and decides it wants to destroy Yahoo and MSN. Easily! It’ll just squeeze the communication lines between all Comcast customers and those sites. So we as a consumer can only go to Google because the other sites are too slow. This is only an example and nothing against the fore mentioned companies.
If you haven’t heard about it already, the opposing for to this is an idea called “Net neutrality” that states that all the net should be free and a company like Comcast or Verizon doesn’t have the right to block any particular portion of the web. (well, I would personally like the bandwidth of some of the porno site cut down a bit so it would free up some bandwidth for the rest of us. But that shouldn’t happen!) People should have the right to visit any site they please because that’s their free will to do so.
The Justice Department as an example, cited that “the U.S. Postal Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.” This is completely off the wall because this is not the same! The post office is charging us based upon speed and distance. This is a rational structure. They would never charge us more for a letter to be sent to Peter who lives next to Paul. But this is what the internet providers want to do.
I start my blog on a sad note, my most favorite magazine of all time Business 2.0 will be discontinuing. As posted in Forbes.com today, the magazine will have their final issue this October. I will be a sad occasion for all their 600,000 readers. We’re a small bunch, but we really love the magazine!
The parent company, Time, has decided not to sell this sector but rather role the head editors into their Forbes brand. This could be a good thing, because I do enjoy their website. My message to those all those who have worked at the magazine, thank you, thank you for all your hard work. My fiance and will both miss you lots! My hamster will miss you too, she did enjoy your magazine shredding after I finished with it, but then, she’s a fickle girl.
And one final thought . . . what are you going to do with my subscription, I am signed up until 2009!
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