First up this week, I want to brief you on a first-of-its-kind unionizing push among academic researchers here that’s being closely watched far beyond the West Coast.
Organizers are in the final stages of setting up a union exclusively for the 5,000 academic researchers within the University of Californiasystem. (These are the folks who have titles like project scientist or professional researcher; they’re not faculty, postdocs, or graduate students.) The organizers expect later this spring to begin negotiating with the UC on what would be a landmark contract.
The effort here is attracting nationwide attention amid a wave of academic organizing. In 2018 alone, graduate workers unionized at Brown, Georgetown, and Harvard. So did postdocs at the University of Washington. And at Columbia, the university agreed to start bargaining with unionized postdocs and graduate workers.
The new union for staff scientists in the UC system is called Academic Researchers United, or ARU for short. It’s being set up as a unit within UAW Local 5810, a union that represents over 6,500 postdocs within the UC system.
ARU surveyed the UC system’s academic researchers to generate a list of initial bargaining demands. Among them: better pay and benefits; job security in cases where funding for a certain project runs out; more transparency around hiring and promotion decisions; and protections for international researchers.
“At this moment, academic researchers have no job security and are facing super uncertain career paths. And UC does very little” to support or retain academic researchers, Anke Schennink, president of UAW Local 5810 and a former postdoc at UC Davis, told me.
Schennink added that postdocs and academic researchers around the country are contacting ARU, many of them asking for advice about how to do similar organizing at their own institutions.
For the UC’s part, a spokesperson told me that the university system “believes strongly in employees’ right to decide for themselves whether being in a union would be beneficial to them.”
Now, onto the latest headlines
The Silicon Valley investment firm HealthQuest Capital is out with some news this morning: It just closed a new $440 million fund. The plan is to invest in commercial-stage companies working on health tech and diagnostics.
Impossible Foods, the Silicon Valley startup behind the meatless Impossible Burger, is expanding into Burger King, the New York Times reports. The fast food chain is rolling out Impossible's vegetarian version of the Whopper sandwich — a major milestone for the plant-based meat industry that would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago.
Helix, the Silicon Valley firm that has built an app store for DNA tests, just co-launched the latest genetic screen for disease risk. As the market for these sorts of tests expands, my STAT colleague Kate Sheridan and I mapped out five burning questions that companies in the space are trying to answer.
This past week brought news of two sets of layoffs in the Bay Area:
- The big drug maker AbbVie is cutting 178 jobs from South San Francisco-based Stemcentrx, the once high-flying biotech that has since disappointed in spectacular fashion since AbbVie bought it in 2016.
- San Francisco-based Clover Health, which sells Medicare Advantage health plans, is laying off about 140 employees. The unicorn startup plans to refocus its hiring on employees with more experience in health insurance and health technology, the Wall Street Journal's Heather Mack reports.
Three years ago, Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker put $250 million behind a new model for developing cancer treatments that harness the immune system. This week, his Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy unveiled its first-ever clinical trial results, from a safety study in patients with pancreatic cancer, my STAT colleague Adam Feuerstein reports.
As Uber ramps up its medical transportation business, it's brought on a big new hire to head up the legal side of things: Lamis Hossain, who previously spent 16 years as a lawyer for the big drug distributor McKesson, CNBC's Chrissy Farr reports.
NBC News is out with a story involving fears of Chinese espionage, HIV prevention research, and the gay dating app Grindr. After the Los Angeles-based Grindr was bought by a Chinese gaming company early last year, the Trump administration began investigating the company around last summer because of concerns about the potential for the China government to access sensitive user data, including their HIV status. Around the same time, the company engaged in initial discussions about collaborating with a researcher from China's equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on HIV prevention research, though the project was not ultimately carried out.
As concerns mount about the health hazards at play when parents refuse to vaccinate their children, keep an eye on a case unfolding in Arizona. Earlier this year, police raided a home to forcibly take a sick and unvaccinated toddler to the hospital against the will of the boy's parents. Now, an Arizona lawmaker wants to review the procedures that led to the incident, CNN reports.
As Uber ramps up its medical transportation business, it's brought on a big new hire to head up the legal side of things: Lamis Hossain, who previously spent 16 years as a lawyer for the big drug distributor McKesson, CNBC's Chrissy Farr reports.
NBC News is out with a story involving fears of Chinese espionage, HIV prevention research, and the gay dating app Grindr. After the Los Angeles-based Grindr was bought by a Chinese gaming company early last year, the Trump administration began investigating the company around last summer because of concerns about the potential for the China government to access sensitive user data, including their HIV status. Around the same time, the company engaged in initial discussions about collaborating with a researcher from China's equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on HIV prevention research, though the project was not ultimately carried out.
As concerns mount about the health hazards at play when parents refuse to vaccinate their children, keep an eye on a case unfolding in Arizona. Earlier this year, police raided a home to forcibly take a sick and unvaccinated toddler to the hospital against the will of the boy's parents. Now, an Arizona lawmaker wants to review the procedures that led to the incident, CNN reports.
Chart of the week
Now that we're officially three months into 2019, the folks at the digital health venture firm Rock Health took a look at the funding that's flowed into the sector so far this year. All told in the first quarter, investors poured $986 million into the digital health industry, much of it to companies in the Bay Area. Interestingly, that collective haul is down a bit relative to the first quarter of the past two years; M&A activity in the sector was down, too, relative to recent quarters. Rock Health's full report has more details.
Two podcast episodes worth your time
If you, like me, are into podcasts, I want to recommend two episodes I listened to this week that got me thinking about health care issues on the West Coast.
The first was a new episode of Bloomberg's podcast "Prognosis." It covers the brave new world in which spit kits from genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry are leading unsuspecting consumers to family members they never knew they had.
I also listened to the San Francisco Chronicle's new podcast "Fifth & Mission." The very first episode out this week is about suicidal people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge — and the effort to save them with a safety net, now under construction and slated to be finished by early 2021. The episode tells the gut-wrenching story of one Sacramento family that emerged as fierce advocates for the building of a safety net after their 18-year-old son Kyle Gamboa jumped to his death off the bridge in 2013. Also worth a read is an accompanying story about the Gamboa family from a few weeks back.
I also listened to the San Francisco Chronicle's new podcast "Fifth & Mission." The very first episode out this week is about suicidal people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge — and the effort to save them with a safety net, now under construction and slated to be finished by early 2021. The episode tells the gut-wrenching story of one Sacramento family that emerged as fierce advocates for the building of a safety net after their 18-year-old son Kyle Gamboa jumped to his death off the bridge in 2013. Also worth a read is an accompanying story about the Gamboa family from a few weeks back.
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