Happy Wednesday, and thanks for tuning in to Go West.
First up, I want to brief you on an odd story out of Arizona. It involves corporate scandals in biopharma, local boosterism, and questions about what it means to rewrite history.
When it comes to having a bad corporate reputation, it doesn’t get much worse than Insys Therapeutics and Theranos.
Last week, five former Insys executives, including founder John Kapoor, were found guilty of racketeering in pushing the company’s powerful opioid. Meanwhile, ex-Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her former No. 2 Sunny Balwani are facing criminal charges for defrauding investors, patients, and physicians.
All of which makes it a little awkward, in retrospect, that an Arizona trade group honored Insys (in 2014) and Theranos (in 2015) as the “Arizona Bioscience Company of the Year.”
“It is a bit uncomfortable to have them on the list,” acknowledged Joan Koerber-Walker, president and CEO of the Arizona BioIndustry Association, or AZBio.
But AZBio’s board of directors has no plans to rescind the honor to either of its scandal-ridden awardees, though the question has been discussed. That’s because so many of these companies’ Arizona-based employees did, in fact, do the work they were recognized for — and haven’t been accused of wrongdoing, Koerber-Walker said.
After all, researchers and executives at Arizona-based Insys did successfully develop the fentanyl spray Subsys and earn FDA approval in 2012 to market it for severe cancer pain. (It was around then that the criminal activity began.)
And Theranos picked Arizona as the main testing ground for its technology. Arizona-based Theranos employees did, after all, successfully open up several dozen “wellness centers” inside Walgreens stores in Arizona over a matter of months starting in 2013. (The result: Many Arizona patients received flawed medical results that in some cases impacted their care.)
The award in question seeks to honor “the for-profit bioscience company whose Arizona-based operations did the most to transform the world during the last 12 months.”
“Now if they had won a business ethics award? We might be having a different conversation,” Koerber-Walker said with a laugh.
Now, onto the latest headlines
AZBio has never honored UBiome with any awards, which is probably a prescient call, because the microbiome startup has had a truly brutal week. You may recall that in the last edition of this newsletter, I caught you up on the news that the FBI had raided the company’s San Francisco office as part of an investigation into its billing practices. Since then? UBiome’s co-CEOs have been placed on leave. The startup has notified customers that it’s temporarily suspending clinical operations for its physician-ordered tests. And if that wasn’t enough, Business Insider FOIA’d customer complaints about UBiome sent in recent months to the Federal Trade Commission; it found 28 such complaints, 22 of which involved billing problems.
Alphabet’s life sciences unit Verily announced its first industry collaboration, taking on a key challenge in gene editing with a project to develop lipid nanoparticles to deliver CRISPR into cells. Verily will be teaming up with a new biotech company called Verve Therapeutics, which emerged from stealth mode yesterday with an ambitious mission to develop CRISPR therapies as one-and-done treatments for heart disease. In another Alphabet connection, Verve’s lead investor is GV, the conglomerate’s venture capital arm formerly known as Google Ventures.
Apple is gearing up for its annual software conference next month, where it will unveil a few new features to improve its health offerings, Bloomberg reports. On Apple devices, users will soon see a revamped version of the Health app with more extensive menstrual period tracking and a new “hearing health” feature to gauge the loudness of your music or the world around you. The Apple Watch, meanwhile, will feature new health monitoring apps known for now as “Dose” (for medication adherence) and “Cycles” (for menstrual cycles).
For the latest installment of STAT’s ongoing series highlighting influential people at each of the Big Tech companies pushing into health care, I mapped out five names you should know at Google. On my list: a genomics whiz, an evangelist for data storage in the cloud, and a product manager working to generate insights from retinal images. (ICYMI, past articles in our series have covered health-focused people at Verily, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.)
Here’s an intriguing collaboration: The Los Angeles area biotech giant Amgen has inked a deal with San Francisco medical data startup Syapse to try to build new “observational research analytics” to assess how well cancer patients are faring. What will that look like? Syapse will try to find patients in its network who might be eligible for Amgen’s clinical trials. And Amgen will have access to real-world evidence, a still-experimental approach with goals like using data collected from health records to mimic a control group.
“Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley,” writes the New York Times’ Nellie Bowles in a fashion section piece that instantly lays out its case and yet still feels insightful and surprising in its observations. The CEO of Twitter and Square has become something of a wellness guru, endorsing products and inspiring acolytes who look to emulate Dorsey’s extreme fasting and other self-experimentation practices, Bowles reports. But some readers pushed back on the comparison to Paltrow; they argued that while the Hollywood star has built Goop into a profitable empire that has peddled products without scientific backing, Dorsey isn’t trying to make money from his personal exploration of wellness.
Apple is gearing up for its annual software conference next month, where it will unveil a few new features to improve its health offerings, Bloomberg reports. On Apple devices, users will soon see a revamped version of the Health app with more extensive menstrual period tracking and a new “hearing health” feature to gauge the loudness of your music or the world around you. The Apple Watch, meanwhile, will feature new health monitoring apps known for now as “Dose” (for medication adherence) and “Cycles” (for menstrual cycles).
For the latest installment of STAT’s ongoing series highlighting influential people at each of the Big Tech companies pushing into health care, I mapped out five names you should know at Google. On my list: a genomics whiz, an evangelist for data storage in the cloud, and a product manager working to generate insights from retinal images. (ICYMI, past articles in our series have covered health-focused people at Verily, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.)
Here’s an intriguing collaboration: The Los Angeles area biotech giant Amgen has inked a deal with San Francisco medical data startup Syapse to try to build new “observational research analytics” to assess how well cancer patients are faring. What will that look like? Syapse will try to find patients in its network who might be eligible for Amgen’s clinical trials. And Amgen will have access to real-world evidence, a still-experimental approach with goals like using data collected from health records to mimic a control group.
“Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley,” writes the New York Times’ Nellie Bowles in a fashion section piece that instantly lays out its case and yet still feels insightful and surprising in its observations. The CEO of Twitter and Square has become something of a wellness guru, endorsing products and inspiring acolytes who look to emulate Dorsey’s extreme fasting and other self-experimentation practices, Bowles reports. But some readers pushed back on the comparison to Paltrow; they argued that while the Hollywood star has built Goop into a profitable empire that has peddled products without scientific backing, Dorsey isn’t trying to make money from his personal exploration of wellness.
Spotted on 'Jeopardy!'
THIS CLUE AIRED DURING LAST THURSDAY NIGHT'S EPISODE OF THE GAME SHOW. (SHRADDHA CHAKRADHAR/STAT)
I'll take near-universal name recognition for $9 billion, Alex.
This week in West Coast health policy
A push is moving forward that would make Beverly Hills, Calif., the first American city to outlaw the sale of tobacco products nearly everywhere within the municipality. Last night, city council members there made some changes to the proposal, which would carve out exemptions in a few cases, such as for three upscale cigar lounges and for the sale of cigarettes via a hotel’s room service or concierge. The council looks likely to approve the measure on May 21, the Associated Press reports.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been pitching an ambitious plan in which the state would provide health coverage to unauthorized immigrants between the ages of 19 and 25. The problem? It appears to necessitate a reallocation of state money that some county public health officials say is essential in fighting sexually transmitted diseases and measles outbreaks, California Healthline reports.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been pitching an ambitious plan in which the state would provide health coverage to unauthorized immigrants between the ages of 19 and 25. The problem? It appears to necessitate a reallocation of state money that some county public health officials say is essential in fighting sexually transmitted diseases and measles outbreaks, California Healthline reports.
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