Viz.ai secures BMS backing for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy-spotting AI – Another in a wave of companies using ECG and ML to sus out minute changes in patients ECGs which are fingerprints of a crime scene that represent a greater change in the patient conditions. Notably, Apple also announced last week that they were moving closer to developing a non-invasive glucose monitoring application in the Apple watch. This is highly doubtful. This is what I had worked on in college, using ECG signal data to pin down changes in electrolytes broadly. While I believe its possible, the accuracy needed for diabetics is likely not going to be achieved in a long time.
Big Pharma regained its mojo this year - You only have to look at Fierce Biotech’s Layoff Tracker to see that 2022 was a grim year for biotechs. How grim? Well, only a fifth of the 532 small cap biotech stocks tracked by Evaluate Vantage ended up on the year, “with many trading below cash,” according to the market insights company’s latest report.
Despite a “year of deep declines” in share prices, it was a recovery among big cap companies in the final quarter that saved biopharma from “disaster” in 2022, Evaluate said. This $567 billion surge in combined market cap for the 11 biggest pharmas recovered almost six months’ worth of losses, the authors noted. Leading the big cap cavalry charge was Novo Nordisk, followed by Moderna, Gilead and BeiGene.
I think this is interesting, because it relates to something that others have said that was something that has confused me. It seems that biotech equities offers both counter-cyclical hedging as healthcare is always needed and people are always getting sick, but in a high interest rate environment, hedge funds rotate out of the riskier biotechs. Pharma offers the stability and risk aversion with the counter-cyclical revenues.
CZI in Chi: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sets first location for $1B biohub expansion – I spent some time speaking to people at incubators in Chicago such as mHUB and MATTER. At the time, people were very bullish and purposefully looking to set up Chicago as a medtech ecosystem. I was skeptical. Chicago has the least innovative culture you can imagine. Perhaps if Zuck sees something, there could be a big move of biotech to Chicago. But seems they’re focusing on devices in this push.
“This institute will embark on science to embed miniaturized sensors into tissues that will allow us to understand how healthy and diseased tissues function in unprecedented detail,” Priscilla Chan, M.D., said in the release, adding that improving that understanding will give researchers a better idea of “what goes wrong in disease and how to fix it.”
Regardless, this is great, it levels with last week’s theme of the need for precision data FIRST, before we can make advancements in biotech. We need the data to hand the complexity off to computers, which can back into the solutions we need to advance biotech.
Loneliness a product of social connections – Loneliness shrinks the brain and leads to actual problems in development. Loneliness area fires up in a certain part of the brain called the default network. It is not linked to the amygdala as many had previously thought. Experiments reveal that loneliness is more of a feeling of rejection rather than anything else and should be considered a feeling of deprivation like hunger or thirst. After a certain amount of time, people gravitate back towards social.
I don’t actually have a great grasp of this, but seems like they are developing these below hydrogel scaffolds (polymer structures that absorb significantly more water than their mass) for neurons to grow on like vines on a fence. Neurons are not regenerative so hydrogels are being used to revert cancer cells to stem cells in less than 24 hours.
Bat Science – Using bats as a blueprint for human immunity