Outside Innovation

Don't Miss Your Chance to Shape the Future of Medicine

To me, the most exciting initiative that's been triggered by President Obama’s focus on Precision Medicine is the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort program. Its goal is to recruit a cohort of 1 million people in the U.S., all of whom agree to share their health data, including their medical histories, their health records, and their genetic data, with researchers and clinicians. The mission of the Precision Medicine Initiative is: To enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that empower patients, researchers, and providers to work together toward development of individualized treatments.

Why would you participate?

1. To benefit from the opportunity to have medical researchers proactively detect, identify, target and safely and effectively treat any health problems that can be detected by analyzing patterns at the molecular level across populations of people.

2. In order to accelerate medical research and treatment by contributing your own health data to the commons.

To put this US initiative in perspective, in Iceland, over the past 15 years, 1/10th of the population's genomes have been sequenced and analyzed, providing health breakthroughs that have benefited both the entire population of Iceland, but also people all around the world. The Estonian Genome Project is a population-based biological database and biobank which was established in 2000 to improve public health in Estonia. It contains health records and biological specimens from 52,000 adults. It's goal is to collect genealogical, genome and health data from 5% of the population. The UK's National Health Service has been implementing the UK's 100,000 Genome Project since 2012. 

The US Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program does not plan to start with whole genome sequencing of 1 million people, but it hopes to wind up there. In the meantime, the goals are a bit more pragmatic: the PMI Cohort Program will be collecting electronic health records, baseline health exams, self-reported measures, and specific panels of genes that act as pharmacogenetic markers. (These markers are used in a clinical setting to determine the efficacy and safety of specific drug treatments for particular groups of patients.) The PMI Cohort will begin with a "direct volunteer pilot."

Reframing the Broken US/EU Data Protection Safe Harbor Agreement as a "Privacy Shield"

Pattys' Pioneers have been tracking the collapse of the Safe Harbor agreement between the EU and the US that has made it illegal to move customer data between the EU and the U.S.. Scott Jordan posted a link to this wonderful story that appeared in Politico on February 5th: The Phone Call that Saved Safe Harbor: How three months, two women and a last-minute intervention brought about the new transatlantic data pact by Zoya Sheftalovich.

Safe Harbor is not yet "saved." What this article describes wonderfully are the last minute diplomatic efforts that took place in late January/early February to keep US companies from being inconvenienced. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

"The breakthrough phone call came in the middle-of-the-night last Tuesday [Feb. 2]. On the line: John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, and Frans Timmermans, the first vice-president of the European Commission.

"Negotiations were at a stalemate and running out of time. Officials from the European Union and America could not break through a couple of roadblocks to forge an agreement to give legal cover for companies to transfer data across the Atlantic. The official January 31 deadline had already passed."....

"Two obstacles remained: How would the U.S. guarantee that complaints from Europeans would be investigated? How would the Commission ensure data would not be intercepted indiscriminately as it traveled across the Atlantic?"

"At 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 2, the deal was announced in a triumphant press conference in Strasbourg....."

"But the issue is far from settled."

EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova and Vice President Andrus Ansip

What Did the EU & US [Executive Branch] Agree to?

We don't know!

Patty's Pioneers' Tech Predictions 2016

Every year, members of Patty's Pioneers' group enjoy sharing their technology predictions for the coming year. This year's submissions are interestingly diverse. Several touched on topics I hadn't heard of, much less thought about, such as:

• Biogenetic Malware: CRISPR: Pat Kerpan: "In 2016, we'll get the first real "MALWARE" scare from the CRISPR biogenetic technologies."

• Biomimetics: Scott Jordan: "Here we see an emerging compute paradigm similar to the biological structure known as a ganglion: a mini-brain, a peripheral intelligence interposed between transducers in the field and central processors in the cloud."

• Bitcoin & Blockchains: Peter Horne: "In 2016 Bitcoin gets increasingly politicized because the Chinese and Europeans dominate the hash network...Traditional banking will keep driving blockchain projects."

• Silicon Cognition & Pre-Cognition: Scott Jordan: "These systems learn by observing large data sets.  Their predictive capability self-adjusts over time via observation and feedback. And, when idle, they dream."

There were several themes that seemed to clump together, although different people came at them from different angles:

• APIs: Donald Callahan: "The Internet of Things will be a big factor as it becomes the Internet of APIs"; Phil Gibson: by October, [Apigee] were at 27M API calls per month and growing at an exponential rate."

• Cloud Lock-In: Donald Callahan: "AWS, in particular, is now differentiating, not on vanilla IaaS, but on innovation - with attractive functions like the event-driven Lambda service (among many other things) that only AWS offers. In this context, portability is a pipe dream."  Peter Horne: "ARM desktop relacements and high-end servers will start to take off, especially for large corporates where 'cloud lock in' and 'jurisdiction matters' start to become management issues."

• Cybersecurity & Internet of Things Security: Donald Callahan: "Software and connected sensors (with APIs) will be everywhere...Now think about state-backed hackers who want to take out dissidents and tech-savvy jihadists who want to destroy anyone and everything. The new security challenges are going to be horrible." Peter Horne: "a boogie man always in the future that is so horrifying that regulators will tell us we need to stop whatever the business was doing with the technology, and just focus on the boogie man in the technology...there's lots and lots of work to be had selling night time stories to scared C suites."

• Virtual Reality: Pat Kerpan: "2016 is the year everyone will have a VR "experience." Peter Horne: "Virtual Reality continues to grow and MS and Google continue to drive the pack."

Specific companies that Pioneers mentioned as being impacted (positively or negatively) in 2016, included:

• Amazon: Pat Kerpan: "In 2016, the AWS user base more clearly begins to bifurcate"
• Apigee: Phil Gibson: "Apigee will crack $100M in revenue in 2016 with an amazing $50M in real profit!!!!!"