Closer Look
Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs hear how to get paid in health care
Bright ideas for transforming health care with artificial intelligence, sensors, or video calls can go only so far. Health tech entrepreneurs need to get paid for them. Articulating a viable business model is a particular challenge for many Bay Area health tech ventures, Greg Yap, a partner at the firm Menlo Ventures, told founders attending a business boot camp, if their founders aren't deeply enmeshed in the world of providers, payers, drug developers, and pharmacy benefit managers.
"Companies are having a hard time getting paid for the value they're creating, proving they create the value and for actually getting stakeholders in the community to pay for it," he said. He thinks their products could actually help patients or meaningfully cut medical costs, but "the vast majority of them cannot adequately get paid by the health care system." STAT's Mohana Ravindranath has more.
neuroscience
Study says the placenta and the brain both play pivotal roles in genetic risk of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia may not be an illness just of the brain, but also of the placenta, a new genetic study suggests. Researchers link 139 genes expressed in the placenta to risk of schizophrenia, pinpointing their reduced ability to carry out normal functions such as providing nutrients and oxygen crucial to brain development. The researchers, who describe their discoveries in Nature Communications today, also identified genes in the placenta that are causative factors for diabetes, bipolar disorder, depression, autism, and ADHD, but they found far more genetic associations with genes for schizophrenia than for any of these other disorders.
Also, in a small sample of placentas from mothers who had Covid-19 during pregnancy, these schizophrenia genes were dramatically activated. Viral infections have been implicated in schizophrenia before, but the new finding indicates that Covid infection during pregnancy may be a risk factor for schizophrenia because of how infection affects the placenta.
in the lab
To incubate, perchance to dream
"Targeted dream incubation" doesn't sound poetic, but its well-timed prompts as we drift off to sleep could transform our thoughts into creative flights of fancy, a new study in Scientific Reports suggests. Sleep onset is a rich phase for making unusual connections, so scientists experimented with suggesting a topic to dream about just at that point.
With an app-connected glove that sensed when study subjects fell asleep and then quickly woke them up, researchers could see if they dreamed creatively about the topic suggested by the audio app just as they were nodding off. Among 49 participants divided into four groups ("tree" prompt, "your own thoughts" prompt, no prompt, no nap), those instructed to think about trees were rated the most creative storytellers. Bonus: The paper cites Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali for habitually falling asleep holding a heavy object, which would wake them up after it fell, just when dreams are most vivid.
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