Closer Look
The gatekeeper: How Y Combinator's only health care partner decides which startups have a shot
Constanza Hevia for STAT
Surbhi Sarna (above) knows what it takes to make it in health care. She sold her women's health company to Boston Scientific for $275 million at age 32. She's also tasted failure, so she understands success requires both a compelling idea and the entrepreneur's commitment to it. As the only health care partner at Y Combinator, she brings that knowledge to vet projects and people vying for a place in the famed Silicon Valley accelerator.
"Sometimes you'll talk to a team and they have all these side projects or they want to keep many doors open at the same time," she said. "If you have your full-time job and you're also consulting and you have two different [ideas] you're not taking on the risk for what it means to be a founder." STAT's Mohana Ravindranath spent time with Sarna for the first report in "The Gatekeepers," a series profiling influential figures in health tech. Read more.
medical education
Black M.D.-Ph.D. students leave training at higher rates than their white peers
A new study of nearly 5,000 students enrolled in M.D.-Ph.D. programs between 2004 and 2012 found attrition rates were 50% higher for Black students than white students, with 17% of white students not completing training and 29% of Black students not doing so, STAT's Usha Lee McFarling reports. While the study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, did not probe the reasons for the difference in attrition rates, the authors noted that Black medical students report higher rates of mistreatment and discrimination that can lead to depression, burnout, and leaving training.
Higher attrition rates, they noted, are harming efforts to diversity the biomedical workforce. A STAT investigation published last year found that Black residents were far more likely to be dismissed from or leave residency training than white physicians — especially in the most lucrative and elite specialties — providing one explanation for why the number of Black physicians in many of these fields has not risen appreciably in decades.
in the lab
Mythbusters come for microbiome hype
More than two decades after research into the microbiome began blooming, we're familiar with the population of microbes that live in or on us, outnumbering us by 10 to 1. But that last bit is just one of many myths, scientists writing a perspective piece in Nature Microbiology assert (it's more like 1:1). So is the source of the word "microbiome": No, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg did not name it in 2001. Here are my favorites among the dozen misconceptions Alan Walker and Lesley Hoyles puncture so they don't undermine the real importance of this research:
- Awareness of the microbiome is new: Not really. That 10:1 back-of-the-envelope estimate dates to the 1970s; you can go back centuries.
- We inherit our microbiota from our mothers at birth: Actually, most gut microbiota diversity occurs after birth, most dramatically after weaning.
- Most diseases come from a microbiome gone bad: "Microorganisms and their metabolites are neither 'good' nor 'bad', they merely exist," the authors say, so more like correlation than causation.
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