Wearables
How good is Apple's sleep apnea feature?
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Apple made a splash with new health technologies it announced a few weeks ago, including an Apple Watch feature that alerts people if it determines they may have sleep apnea. Given that millions of people use the Apple Watch, experts flag a familiar trade-off: There is tremendous potential to help many people with undiagnosed sleep apnea, but it could also lead to notifications for lots of people who don't need to be treated.
To address this, Apple erred on the side of caution, choosing a threshold likely to identify people with severe disease but which may miss people with a milder condition. As I report in a new story diving into the clinical data behind the feature, the company worked to minimize false positive risk while retaining an "impactful true positive rate."
"It means that it won't identify every single person at risk of [sleep apnea], just those with more significant disease," Seema Khosla, medical director at North Dakota Center for Sleep told me. "I think this is OK… By looking for the lowest-hanging fruit — i.e. those with more significant [sleep apnea] — we are more likely to find something clinically meaningful and important for people."
Read my whole story analyzing Apple's data here
Investment
ARCH raises $3 billion with AI in its sights
ARCH Venture Partners, a firm known for its contrarian bets on biotechnology, raised $3 billion for a new fund, STAT's Allison DeAngelis reports. Among the stated themes for the fund is artificial intelligence. It has in the past made investments on health care and diagnostic companies outside its traditional focus, and more specifically, on companies centered on computer algorithms, including drug startup Insitro and R2 Technology, which created a computer-aided detection system for mammograms.
"I think technologies tend to come of age… They go from having impact in small quadrants, like defining chemical structure, to larger impact," ARCH managing director Kristina Burow told Allison.
Read the whole story on the new fund here
Business Can Anne Wojcicki save 23andMe?
In case you missed it, 23andMe is in a bit of a pickle. The genetic testing and drug development company's stock trades far below a dollar, and its whole board just quit over disagreements with co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki who made a failed attempt to take the company private.
As STAT's Matthew Herper, who has covered the company since 2007, writes, it's not the first time Wojcicki has had to figure out how to bail out the company in a tricky time.
"It once had its main products removed from the market by the Food and Drug Administration, to not only survive but continue to grow," he writes. "But over the past year, the realities of being a company with a publicly traded stock have brought the firm to its knees. "
Read Matt's take on 23andMe's future here
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