Life Science

Patient Advocacy

Today I attended a meeting of the BayBio Patient Advocacy Committee. BayBio is a SF Bay Area life science industry trade group. I sit on their patient advocacy committee, and we’re working to bring "patient advocacy groups," as the ACS and other disease NPOs are known, together with biotech companies. We’re looking for a common ground where the missions of ...

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Declaring Biowar on Cancer

Excerpts from Technology Review: In one unusual form of biological attack, researchers are engineering viruses to seek and destroy the cells that run amok in cancer patients. After more than 10 years of lab work, researchers in the field of oncolytic therapy have reached a sort of critical mass, deploying their designer viruses in a number of human trials.

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Hello. This is your kidney speaking

Technology Review recently caught wind of IBM’s expansion of the Mobile Health Tool Kit. The set up uses a patient’s mobile phone to collect data from devices that constantly monitor heart rate, activity, and even how much medication the patient is taking. The phone keeps records of the data and sends off reports to doctors at regular intervals. Researchers at ...

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Don't pull my plug!

A good article in BusinessWeek online about the progress being made in implanting devices in the body to regulate body functions and treat some otherwise untreatable conditions. They’ve come a long ways from the first pacemakers and much more is ahead–including drug administration devices for diseases like cancer.  The big hangup? You guessed it…cost. Forty-five years ago, doctors successfully implanted ...

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