First up this week: I spent Monday night at the San Francisco premiere of the new Theranos documentary “The Inventor,” and I want to tell you about it.
There was something surreal about seeing the film at a theater in the Presidio, a lushly beautiful park here that’s home to venture capital firms and signs warning of lurking mountain lions. I kept trying to think of the right analogy: Was it most akin to going to the Boston premiere of “The Departed"? Or to watching a screening of "The Wolf of Wall Street" at Goldman Sachs’ headquarters?
At any rate, the premiere drew an interesting crowd. I spotted a guy wearing a black turtleneck. There were also a few VIPs in the audience: The 20-something Theranos whistleblower Tyler Schultz was there. So was the musician MC Hammer, whose iconic anthem “U Can’t Touch This” gives voice to one of the most striking moments of the film: footage of a company celebration featuring a dancing Elizabeth Holmes.
After the screening, the filmmakers and a few of their subjects got on stage for a panel discussion that struck a surprisingly empathetic tone when it came to dissecting Holmes’ motives. The exception was Dr. Phyllis Gardner, the Stanford professor who was approached by a 19-year-old Holmes about an idea that would turn into Theranos. On Monday night, Gardner didn’t hold back in condemning Holmes: “I think she is — this is my opinion! — a sociopath. I think she’s a liar of the deepest, worst order, and I think she’s sadistic and cruel,” Gardner said.
The crowd’s reaction? Applause and cheers.
“The Inventor” will be in theaters for one week starting on Friday in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. It will premiere on HBO this coming Monday night. And if you’re hungry for more Theranos content before then, my STAT colleague Damian Garde reviewed the film, and I snagged an interview with director Alex Gibney.
Now, onto the latest headlines
After a spate of bad press about anti-vaccine content on its site, Facebook announced it would take various steps to try to address the problem, including rejecting certain ads and not recommending certain pages. Meanwhile, women’s health startups that sell lubricants to women going through menopause are unhappy with Facebook; they say the site blocks their ads and holds them to a different standard than companies that sell products for erectile dysfunction to men, CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez reports.
So far, digital health companies have been left out of a hot IPO market for tech and biotech. Silicon Valley-based Livongo Health, which is paid by insurers and health plans to monitor patients with chronic disease, could be among the first to change that. The company is preparing to go public as soon as the third quarter of this year, the Wall Street Journal reports.
My eyes usually glaze over whenever I hear mention of cloud vendors, but I was fascinated by a new story from my STAT colleague Casey Ross. He documents the high-stakes race by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to ramp up their offerings to win contracts as hospitals, increasingly interested in artificial intelligence, rapidly move their health data into the cloud.
Consumer genetics giant 23andMe is out with a new report that tells you how your DNA affects your risk for type 2 diabetes. I drove down to the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters to talk to executives about the new offering — and also interviewed top diabetes specialists who are hopeful but unconvinced that it will be useful. Here’s what they had to say.
This week brought a few news items of note in the push to feed the world with animal cells grown in the lab instead of traditional meat from the slaughterhouse. The field, which is gaining steam in the Bay Area, just got some regulatory clarity by way of a formal agreement between the FDA and the Department of Agriculture to regulate the space — an important early step toward bringing these products to market, Vox explains. Meanwhile, startups in the field are experimenting with the gene-editing tool CRISPR, Business Insider’s Erin Brodwin reports.
Video calls between patients and physicians have been touted as a way to deliver care more quickly and more widely, especially in rural areas. But an incident that went viral this week highlighted how the technology can backfire. At a Kaiser Permanente emergency department in the Bay Area, the family of a 79-year-old patient said they were horrified to get the devastating news that he was dying via a visit with a doctor who appeared on the screen of a robot. The health system says that the robot-powered visit followed in-person interactions and was not used to deliver the patient’s initial diagnosis.
The Bay Area is cluttered with startups pitching online prescriptions for generic drugs. The engine behind many of them? Silicon Valley-based Truepill, which works behind the curtain to keep online pharmacies running — and just raised some venture funding. Meanwhile, in a sign of the traction these telemedicine startups are getting, the Los Angeles-based prescription drug price shopping site GoodRx has begun listing its offerings alongside those of traditional pharmacies, Business Insider’s Lydia Ramsey reports.
In Washington state, House lawmakers just passed a bill that would give parents more rights to seek mental health care for teenagers who aren’t ready or willing to pursue treatment on their own. As my STAT colleague Megan Thielking reports, the legislation is an attempt to strike a tricky balance between getting more teenagers into treatment — while still giving them authority over their own care.
Judgment Day for the Apple Watch
On Saturday, all eyes will be on the ACC meeting in New Orleans as researchers present results from a huge study assessing the Apple Watch. The clinical trial, which was led by researchers at Stanford and funded by Apple, assessed the product’s ability to detect atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can lead to more serious health concerns. My STAT colleague Kate Sheridan got her hands on a summary of some data from the clinical trial. But Saturday’s readout will give a much fuller picture of the results.
Is the Bay Area's center of gravity moving north?
It may well be, if you look to Y Combinator as a bellwether. The storied incubator has historically hosted its biannual Demo Day — think of it like a debutante ball for up-and-coming startups — in Silicon Valley, at the decidedly old-school Computer History Museum. But on Monday and Tuesday of next week, Y Combinator will be hosting the pitch event in San Francisco proper, at a venue in the city’s booming Mission Bay neighborhood. TechCrunch has more on the shift, which comes as Y Combinator goes through a leadership transition and gets more interested in biology.
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