Bay Area research suffers during government shutdown

Bay Area research suffers during government shutdown

Now, onto the latest headlines

As the longest-ever government shutdown drags on, the San Jose Mercury News examined the impact it’s having on scientific research being conducted in the Bay Area. One furloughed scientist even defied orders and snuck back into the lab to feed some hungry bacteria.

The government shutdown is also disrupting companies’ plans to go public, but that hasn’t stopped another West Coast biotech from joining the IPO queue. San Diego-based Cirius Therapeutics, which wants to raise $86 million, is in mid-stage testing for a drug for the fatty liver disease known as NASH.

Microsoft has struck a deal with Walgreens to build digital health tools for pharmacy customers, my colleague Casey Ross reports. The partnership, which you’ll be shocked to learn involves artificial intelligence, comes just a month after Walgreens inked a similar dealwith Google’s life sciences spinout Verily.

The hospital at the University of California, San Diego, is out with new survey data on the uptake of Apple’s health records service, which lets patients at participating hospitals use their iPhone to look at their labs and charts. Surveyed patients seemed to like the service, although the number of UCSD patients who’ve tried it only numbers in the hundreds so far. Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook predicted on CNBClast week that his company’s “greatest contribution to mankind” will be in the realm of health.

A Silicon Valley company called CardioDx sold millions of dollars worth of its blood test for heart disease over the past six years. Then, this past November, Medicare — one of the biggest purchasers of the test — decided to stop paying for the test on the grounds that it was unnecessary and not useful. Now, the company is shutting down, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Genetic screening used to be mainly for parents-to-be or people worried about their family history of disease. That’s changing amid a push to bring genetic testing into routine primary care. To that end, Bay Area company Color Genomics struck a deal with a Chicago area health system to try to genetically screen more than 10,000 patients.

Hollywood has a long history of taking on biotech. The latest such attempt, now in theaters near you, is called “Replicas.” The film stars Keanu Reeves as a scientist at a fictional Puerto Rico biotech company called Biodyne Industries that’s working on uploading memories of people who’ve died. (Which bears some similarities to what a real Bay Area company called Nectome has talked about doing.) Anyway, “Replicas” is getting absolutely dreadful reviews.