Tag: Health

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Are fringe loans bad for your health?

Fringe loan illustration
Researchers at the University of Washington have weighed correlations between the use of fringe loans and self-assessments of health status. (UW School of Public Health Illustration)

For some low-income workers, short-term fringe loans — coming from payday lenders and check cashing services — are a fact of life. But that doesn’t mean they feel good about taking out those loans.

In a newly published study, University of Washington researchers report that people who use fringe loan services, or don’t have access to a bank account, are more likely to say they feel less healthy.

The study, published in the March issue of Health Affairs, makes use of data from 15,000 respondents that was collected for the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual Current Population Survey.

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Former VP Joe Biden comes out swinging for science

Joe Biden
Former Vice President Joe Biden, shown on a huge video screen, addresses the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas. (GeekWire Photo)

AUSTIN, Texas — Joe Biden may no longer be vice president, but he’s still leading the charge for his cancer moonshot, and for science funding as well.

“The United States government, at this point in our development, should be doubling and tripling down on investment in pure research across the board,” Biden said today in Austin at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That line drew sympathetic applause from the hundreds of scientists and educators who turned out to see the 75-year-old statesman.

Biden is said to be considering a presidential run in 2020, and if that’s the case, his views on science could well be part of the platform.

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How staring at the eclipse led to a world of hurt

Retina burn
An optical coherence tomography image of a woman’s left-eye retina shows a crescent-shaped scar. (Wu et al.. / JAMA Ophthalmology)

A medical case reported today in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology proved the wisdom of all those warnings not to stare at the partly covered sun during August’s solar eclipse.

Unfortunately, it’s too late for the woman at the center of the case: Now she has a permanent scar in her left eye’s retina, and a permanent black spot in her field of vision.

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AI-powered microscope goes commercial in China

For years, the Global Good Fund has been working on a malaria-hunting microscope powered by artificial intelligence, and now China-based Motic is taking advantage of the technology to create EasyScan GO. The partnership was announced this week at the Medica 2017 conference in Germany.

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Malaria-hunting AI microscope is ready for debut

Microscopic view of malaria
A microscopic view of a blood sample shows the telltale signs of malaria as purple dots. (Intellectual Ventures Photo)

SAN FRANCISCO — Can artificial intelligence help battle malaria and other infectious diseases? Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold says it’s time for his company’s AI-enabled microscope to join the fray.

“We’ve gotten to the stage where the machine learning system is better than humans,” Myhrvold said last weekend here at the World Conference of Science Journalists.

He said Intellectual Ventures will announce a partnership with a Chinese company later this month to commercialize the Autoscope technology, which has been under development for years at IV’s lab in Bellevue, Wash.

Myhrvold declined to name the company or provide details about the deal, but he held it up as an example of how technology can further the cause of global health and development.

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How fighting cancer will extend tech frontiers

Gary Gilliland
Gary Gilliland, president of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, fields questions during the GeekWire Summit with moderators Clare McGrane and Alan Boyle. (Photo by Dan DeLong for GeekWire)

The fight against cancer isn’t just about drugs and genetics. It’s also about wearable devices, health-savvy chatbots, machine learning and one of the biggest challenges that cloud computing will ever face.

Gary Gilliland, president and director of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, laid out a roadmap for the challenges ahead — and the commercial opportunities — today during a fireside chat at the 2017 GeekWire Summit.

“We’re not a venture firm,” Gilliland told a packed house at the Seattle Sheraton Hotel. “We don’t intend to be. It actually doesn’t support our mission the way we think about it. But boy, do we need partners.”

One of the reasons for that has to do with the masses of genomic data that need to be collected in order to develop the personalized therapies of the future.

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Fred Hutch’s chief enlists techies to fight cancer

Gary Gillilland
Gary Gilliland, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, stands by his prediction that most cancers will be curable by 2025. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

The president and director of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Gary Gilliland, is bringing big-data experts on board to make good on his controversial prediction that there could be cures and therapies for “most, if not all, human cancers” by 2025.

Those experts include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Mike Clayville, a vice president at Amazon Web Services, both of whom serve on Fred Hutch’s board of trustees.

Gilliland, one of the featured speakers at the upcoming GeekWire Summit, says “big data is going to be hugely important for the next steps” in the fight against cancer, which will focus on leveraging a huge amount of biological data to personalize cancer treatments.

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Khosla powers Viome into wellness market

Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, discusses successes and failures during a Stanford University business forum in 2015. (Stanford Business Photo / Stacy H. Geiken)

Khosla Ventures, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm whose interests range from biofuels to spaceflight, was revealed today as the lead investor in Viome, the wellness monitoring startup co-founded by Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain.

Khosla’s role was among the additional details that Viome provided today as it formally announced its $15 million Series A funding round. The investment first came to light last week in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but Khosla’s role wasn’t previously disclosed.

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Viome raises millions for wellness monitoring

Naveen Jain
Viome CEO Naveen Jain shows how a stool sample would be placed into a kit for an analysis of gut microbes. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Viome, the wellness monitoring service founded by Seattle-area tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, has raised $15 million this month in an investment round, according to documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The equity sale boosts the first commercial venture brought to life by Jain’s BlueDot innovation factory.

Jain deferred comment on the details of the investment today, but in an April interview, he said Viome was just the kind of technological moonshot BlueDot was designed to foster.

“Our moonshot here is, can we create a world where chronic illness becomes a matter of choice?” he said at the time.

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Scientists find recipe to regenerate retinas

Retinal cells
A microscopic view documents how glial cells in the retina can be transformed into functioning neurons. (UW Photo / Tom Reh Lab)

University of Washington researchers have found a way to activate cells in the retinas of adult mice to turn into new neurons – a recipe that eventually could lead to new treatments for human eyes damaged by trauma and disease.

UW biologist Tom Reh, one of the authors of a research paper on the experiments published by the journal Nature, said it’s too early to talk about cures – but not too early to talk about hope.

He told GeekWire that the newly published work on cell conversion complements different approaches that rely on cell transplants.

“I hope that one or the other approach starts to deliver results to patients in the near term,” he said. “We’re working really hard every day to make this work for people.”

Making it work for mice was hard enough.

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