| | | |  | Good morning! STAT science reporting fellow Brittany Trang here with new details on Verily's path forward, the latest layoffs to hit tech, and more. | | | Verily charts a new course  Christine Kao / stat Last week, we learned that Verily is cutting 15% of its staff and restructuring its business. What’s next for the Alphabet spinout that was once a “moonshot factory” for health and medicine? STAT’s Matt Herper and Casey Ross reported in an exclusive yesterday that as Verily tries to “[close] the gap between research and care,” it will lean heavily on its virtual care platform Onduo. Onduo uses devices to help patients manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, and the granular information from that monitoring — which Onduo’s chief science and innovation officer Erich Huang calls the “dark matter” of health care — could be used to understand disease better if it were collected with that purpose in mind.
“You have to design your data system to collect those data so you can actually start asking scientific questions,” Huang said. “Data is no longer a byproduct of what we do. It’s the reason we do what we do.”
As Matt himself has written, data capabilities are what could better prepare us for biology’s century, but it won’t be easy to execute. Read more here. | Two new shots at virtual Covid-19 care Two at-home testing companies are participating in new initiatives that aim to help people with Covid-19 get care at home. eMed will launch a pilot of the federal government’s first entirely virtual Home Test to Treat program in Berks County, Pennsylvania later this month. The program will provide free rapid tests, telehealth sessions, and at-home antiviral treatments for people who test positive. UMass Chan Medical School will collaborate with eMed in evaluating how well the program works.
Meanwhile, Cue Health has partnered with Scripps Research to launch a virtual study called ImmunoCARE, which seeks to determine whether detecting and treating Covid-19 early can reduce hospitalizations and adverse outcomes in immunocompromised people. Participants in the treatment arm of the randomized trial will be provided with up to 10 Cue tests every month for their household and will have the option to use Cue’s telemedicine and antiviral delivery services to treat infections. The remote study will also use CareEvolution’s MyDataHelps research app to study its planned 10,000 nationwide participants. | Layoffs keep hitting big tech On Wednesday, Microsoft announced layoffs for 10,000 employees though the end of Q3 of the 2023 financial year. The cuts amount to less than 5% of Microsoft’s workforce, according to a memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. It is currently unclear the extent to which the company's health businesses will be impacted, but Microsoft said in an SEC filing the cuts are part of a “restructuring plan intended to reduce operating costs."
The workforce reductions follow other big tech companies’ preparation for a slower economy, as Amazon announced in early January that it will lay off 18,000 of its employees, Meta announced 11,000 job cuts, and Salesforce announced it would cut about 10% of its workforce.
On a related note: Teladoc yesterday disclosed plans to cut 6% of its workforce, which amounts to around 300 positions. | Harnessing the power of blockchain to transform value in healthcare Years of rising costs, along with unprecedented innovation, have fundamentally transformed the healthcare system, signaling the urgent need to change the way we pay for healthcare products and services. Learn how Pfizer is leveraging blockchain technology to execute value-based agreements more efficiently — helping to modernize healthcare delivery, save costs and improve patient outcomes. | A boost for diagnostic AI in India and Nigeria In a bid to better equip health care providers to diagnose several conditions the WHO considers “neglected tropical diseases,” the Gates Foundation has partnered with VisualDx, a company that offers machine learning-powered apps and software platforms to help health care workers quickly and accurately diagnose patients.
The funding will go towards VisualDx’s partnerships in India and Nigeria, where the company will both gather more images for its platform as well as better tailor the platform’s algorithms based on prevalence of NTDs in both countries. The company hopes this will help health care workers better diagnose these diseases, especially in underserved areas without enough specialists, but the platform will also have to overcome limitations of artificial intelligence-based tools. More from me here. | The latest industry news - The American Telemedicine Association announced the new chair of its policy council: Mary Griskewicz, the director of federal policy at Cigna. She replaces Mark Hayes, the senior vice president of federal policy and advocacy at Ascension.
- Insilico Medicine announced the first publicly disclosed drug identification hit using AlphaFold. Using AlphaFold-generated protein structures and an AI-powered drug discovery platform called Pharma.AI, researchers discovered a novel target for hepatocellular carcinoma, a common type of liver cancer, and synthesized new drug molecules that showed anti-proliferation activity.
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Carafem, which offers abortion services via telehealth, announced a new online process for patients to be immediately evaluated for an abortion pill prescription. The company says costs average about $199, with financial assistance available to eligible patients. -
Employee wellbeing platform Gympass announced a partnership with Headspace Health to offer mindfulness and meditation-based services to the more than 10,000 companies that use Gympass’s Mind apps and resources. | | | What to read around the web today - ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove, Nature
- A new study links social media use to changes in teen brains. Is that a bad thing?, STAT
- Pandemic years saw a reduction in medical debt, Axios
- Effect of a machine learning recommender system and viral peer marketing intervention on smoking cessation, JAMA Network Open
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