23andMe founder files to take company private

23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki has filed to take the genetic testing firm private, offering to buy all shares at the current stock price of 40 cents per share. The proposed deal was made public in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. It will need to be approved by a committee on 23andMe's board as well as the company's shareholders.

23andMe went public in 2021 through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, owned by the billionaire Richard Branson, and soon acquired the telehealth company Lemonaid in a bid to build subscription health care services powered by genetic insights. The company's valuation ballooned to $6 billion but has since declined to $200 million, with recent losses attributed to the telehealth business.

Read more about the news from my colleague Matthew Herper here.

medical devices

Medtech earnings

This earnings season was a mixed bag for medical technology companies. Dexcom especially took a beating, as my colleague Elaine Chen noted last week. Here's a roundup of other noteworthy trends from this week's medtech earnings.

Pulsed field ablation ramps up: Boston Scientific is seeing traction with its new pulsed field ablation devices, a therapy that treats A-Fib by scarring heart tissue with electrical energy. Electrophysiology sales grew 125% this quarter compared to last year's quarter, which CEO Michael Mahoney said was driven by PFA adoption. "We expect this to be maybe the biggest business at Boston Scientific in the years to come," he said.

Teladoc struggles: Teladoc booted its longtime CEO Jason Gorevic back in April, replacing him in June with Chuck Divita. Divita's first earnings call on Wednesday was rough. The company withdrew the three year outlook it put forth just this year, as well as the full 2024 outlook for its mental health segment BetterHelp. The company cited rising ad costs and the unknown outcome of the presidential election as reasons it couldn't produce reliable guidance and was pulling back on new customers.
Stryker touts orthopedic surgical robot: Stryker continues to see demand for its orthopedic surgical robot, Mako, reporting that the robot's sales led to around 15% growth in the company's "other ortho" business. CEO Kevin Lobo wants to go after even more operating rooms: "There're a lot of ORs that still don't have Makos in them, and our teams are out there hunting."

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI to detect Alzheimer's in EEGs

At the Mayo Clinic, David Jones has been working to develop the next generation of algorithms for neurologists to use in practice. From PET scans to EEGs, "it's been very frustrating to me that I'll look at images of my patients, and I won't be able to bring any of that analytics to my clinical decision making," said the neurologist, who leads work in his department's Neurology AI Program. Often, neurology datasets are carefully cleaned and curated — "so any algorithms that run there probably aren't going to translate to your clinical practice," said Jones.

So in a new paper published Wednesday in Brain Communications, Jones and his colleagues tried to flip that paradigm. Using more than 11,000 EEGs from real-world patients — noise and all — they developed an AI model that could distinguish between cognitively healthy patients and those with Alzheimer's and Lewy Body disease. The algorithm is still far from clinical validation, Jones told Katie in a call this week. But he's excited for what it could mean to apply modern data analytics to a technology as cheap and old-school as EEG, he said: "This is exactly the type of thing you want to use AI and ML on, to improve it."

Investigations

Mount Sinai's intimidation campaign

Mount Sinai has tried to suppress the fallout from a May STAT investigation that uncovered an FDA review concluding Mount Sinai researchers misled patients in a controversial brain biopsy project. The agency found that researchers in the Living Brain project, which recruited patients already participating in deep-brain stimulation trials, used "false justification" to obtain patient consent and biopsy their brains.

In a new story, Katherine Eban and her team of reporters found that the hospital network enlisted its own patients to defend the research and sought to stop a professional society of neurosurgeons from issuing a statement that could have jeopardized the project. The study's lead neurosurgeon called a patient STAT had interviewed and asked him to retract his statements.

Read more about the Mount Sinai fallout here.

venture capital

Funding roundup

Fertility tracker FloHealth raised $200 million in a Series C funding round from General Atlantic. The investment pushed the company's valuation beyond $1 billion.

Mental health network SpringHealth (which reached unicorn status in 2021) earned $100 million in a Series E funding round. The Generation Investment Management-led round puts the company at a $3.3 billion valuation.
Healx, a British startup focused on using generative AI to fuel drug development and cofounded by Viagra co-inventor David Brown, raised $47 million in a Series C round. The round was co-led by Silicon Valley-based R42 Group and Atomico.