#HealthTechDeals Episode 16: Doctolib, House Rx, SmithRx, Synapse Medicine, and Kintsugi
May the luck of the Irish be with the health tech sector and may everybody’s valuation go back to where it was for the St. Patrick’s Day episode of Health Tech Deals! In today’s episode, Jess asks me about Doctolib’s €500 million raise with a massive €5.8 billion valuation – this is a doctor booking service and more in Europe. We also cover specialty pharma company House Rx’s $25 million raise, bringing their total up to $30 million, SmithRx’s $27 million raise for its flat-fee PBM, Synapse Medicine’s $28 million raise doing medication management, and Kintsugi’s $20...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 17, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Tech Health Tech Deals Jessica DaMassa Matthew Holt #HealthTechDeals doctolib House Rx Kintsugi SmithRx Synapse Medical Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, February 21st 2022
In conclusion, clinical trials targeting aging in humans have shown promising but limited results on biomarkers so far.
Mycobacterium Vaccae Immunization as an Anti-Inflammatory Strategy
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2022/02/mycobacterium-vaccae-immunization-as-an-anti-inflammatory-strategy/
In today's open access paper, researchers discuss immunization with Mycobacterium vaccae as an approach to reduce the inflammatory overactivity of the aged immune system. Researchers have made some initial inroads into studying the way in which this bacteria can alter the function of the immune system, and her...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 20, 2022 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Quantifying the Effects of Dietary Composition on Human Life Span
In conclusion, a sustained dietary change may give substantial health gains for people of all ages both for optimized and feasible changes. Gains are predicted to be larger the earlier the dietary changes are initiated in life.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003889 (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - February 16, 2022 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Matthew ’s health care tidbits: #What is insurance again?
Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt
For my health care tidbits this week, I was reminded on Twitter that many Americans really don’t understand health insurance. A spine surgeon no less in this thread (no jokes about arrogance please) was telling me that he was paying ~$8,000 a year ($4,000 in insurance and $4,000 in deductible) before he got to “use” his insurance–which, as his medical...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 31, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt Health Care Costs Insurance Pre-existing conditions Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 31st 2022
In conclusion, the effects of MR on the gut barrier were likely related to alleviation of the oscillations of inflammation-related microbes. MR can enable nutritional intervention against age-related gut barrier dysfunction.
Clearing Senescent Cells from the Neural Stem Cell Niche Rapidly Improves Neurogenesis in Old Mice
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2022/01/clearing-senescent-cells-from-the-neural-stem-cell-niche-rapidly-improves-neurogenesis-in-old-mice/
Neurogenesis is the generation of new neurons in the brain, and their integration into existing neural circuits. It is essential to learning a...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 30, 2022 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Assessing the Ability of Urolithin A Supplementation to Improve Human Health via Increased Mitophagy
Mitophagy is the name given to cellular quality control mechanisms responsible for destroying worn and damaged mitochondria. Existing mitochondrial divide to make up the losses. Mitophagy is critical to mitochondrial function, but it declines in effectiveness with advancing age. A number of dietary supplements are thought to upregulate mitophagy in older individuals, thereby improving mitochondrial function and overall health. Urolithin A is one of them, various vitamin B3 derivatives such as nicotinamide riboside another, as well as mitoQ, SkQ1, and other mitochondrially targeted antioxidants. The mechanisms are varied, a...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 27, 2022 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
The Fatally Flawed National Popular Vote Plan
Andy CraigIn Michigan, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) hasqualified to begin gathering signatures to appear on the ballot next year. It appearslikely the petition will succeed, since it enjoys the backing of prominent and experienced Democrats.The basic premise of the NPVIC is to have states each pass an identical piece of legislation under which they would award their electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide. The states would implement this plan once enough states controlling 270 electoral votes have signed on, guaranteeing that the national popular vote winner w...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 17, 2021 Category: American Health Authors: Andy Craig Source Type: blogs
Making the first contact
How do we begin working with someone who is asking for help with their persistent pain? In this post I’ll describe some of the considerations I have when I begin, because as Benedetti points out, the “meet the therapist moment” is one of the most potent times in the therapeutic ritual (Benedetti, 2011). It’s the time when the person’s expectations and the clinician’s empathy and competence meet, and the “meaning response” blooms.
My two clinical questions are:
Why is this person presenting in this way at this time, and what’s maintaining their predicament? And wh...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - October 17, 2021 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: BronnieLennoxThompson Tags: ACT - Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Science in practice biopsychosocial initial assessment Occupational therapy pain management subjective Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, October 11th 2021
In conclusion, this study examined how age and the process of aging are associated with changes in the microbiome of the small intestine, using validated sampling and processing techniques. The most significant differences are higher relative abundance of the phylum Proteobacteria and decreased relative abundance of Bacteroidetes in older subjects when compared to the youngest group. The higher relative abundance of Proteobacteria appeared to affect other duodenal microbial taxa, leading to decreased microbial diversity and increased relative abundance of coliforms and of anaerobic bacteria. The small intestine is vital to...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 10, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
How Much of the Benefit of a Healthier Diet is Due to Natural Calorie Restriction Mimetics?
How much of the benefit of a healthier diet arises from the effects of natural calorie restriction mimetic compounds? That question is an interesting one from a scientific perspective, but the answers are probably not all that valuable in a practical sense. We have a fairly good idea as to the size of the benefits to long-term health obtained via a better diet, and separately by eating less of that diet, the practice of calorie restriction while still obtaining sufficient micronutrients. Calorie restriction mimetic compounds trigger some of the same beneficial cellular stress response mechanisms as does a low calorie diet,...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 5, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
This is your brain on religion
A Providence TV news reporter tells us the sad story of health care workerswho are losing their jobs because they refuse the Covid-19 vaccine. I ' ll quote two of them." It goes against all of my religious beliefs to the core of my existence. " " I have not infected one patient that I know of. Who knows what [the vaccine] is going to do [to our bodies] years from now. I have my own God-given antibodies against this virus. " (She says she has been infected and recovered.)The first speaker is a phlebotomist. The second speaker is a registered nurse who works in a hospital. There is no major religious denomination -- Chr...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 1, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 13th 2021
In this study, mature DCs (mDCs), generated from the GM-CSF and IL-4 induced bone marrow cells, were intravenously injected into wild-type mice. Three days later, assays showed that the mDCs were indeed able to return to the thymus. Homing DCs have been mainly reported to deplete thymocytes and induce tolerance. However, medullary TECs (mTECs) play a crucial role in inducing immune tolerance. Thus, we evaluated whether the mDCs homing into the thymus led to TECs depletion. We cocultured mDCs with mTEC1 cells and found that the mDCs induced the apoptosis and inhibited the proliferation of mTEC1 cells. These effects were onl...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 12, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
A weird human proclivity
That would be anniversaries. It seems to be close to a cultural universal that people mark calendar dates that coincide with significant events that happened on the same date in some past year. When the number of years happens to be a multiple of ten, we make an even bigger deal out of it. If you think about it, this doesn ' t make any sense. The importance of the event is its relevance, if any, to whatever is going on at this moment, not the calendar date on which it happened. (That goes for my birthday, BTW.)So anyway, today we ' re obliged to talk about the Sept. 11 2001 attack. It is quite relevant to stuff that ' s go...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 11, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
How Much of Cardiovascular Disease is Self-Inflicted?
Atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty plaques in blood vessel walls, is an inevitable outcome of aging, driven by chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and other processes that cannot be evaded without the development of new approaches to medical biotechnology. The pace at which this becomes a fatal condition is heavily driven by lifestyle choices, however. All of the usual activities and decisions that physicians tell us to avoid will, over time, lead to a faster progression of atherosclerosis, and a greater risk of mortality due to the rupture or blockage of blood vessels. It is quite possible that many people will be ...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 6, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
D éjà vu All Over Again: A Unitary Biological Mechanism for Intelligence Is (Probably) Untenable
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/8/2/24AbstractNearly a century ago, Spearman proposed that " specific factors can be regarded as the ' nuts and bolts ' of cognitive performance …, while the general factor is the mental energy available to power the specific engines " . Geary (2018; 2019) takes Spearman ' s analogy of " mental energy " quite literally and doubles-down on the notion by proposing that a unitary energy source, the mitochondria, explains variations in both cognitive function and health-related outcomes. This idea is reminiscent of many earlier attempts to describe a low-level biological determinant of general ...
Source: Intelligent Insights on Intelligence Theories and Tests (aka IQ's Corner) - August 30, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: blogs
