- Image by jtyerse via Flickr
Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of health care:
Top 10 VC recipients of ’09: The Top 10 parade continues, with today’s installment featuring the 10 companies that received the most venture funding in 2009, coming from the blog peHUB. Despite 2009 being a banner year for the business of health care, if not health care itself, peHUB includes only one company from the industry in the list. That would be Boulder, Colorado’s Clovis Oncology, which is developing cancer-fighting therapeutics, as the name would suggest.
With the Rise of AI, What IP Disputes in Healthcare Are Likely to Emerge?
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
On the year, Clovis pulled in $146 million in venture funding from investors including Domain Associates, New Enterprise Associates, Versant Ventures and Aberdare Ventures. Clovis also signed a $380 million partnership with Oslo-listed Clavis Pharma, for the further development of a Clavis drug candidate for pancreatic cancer.
In a year that saw the lowest amount of venture funding since 1997, cleantech attracted the most VC attention, placing five companies in the Top 10. No. 1 goes to Fremont, California’s Solyndra, a maker of solar panels for rooftops, that raked in $286 million on the year. At No. 4 was by far the most widely recognized brand of the 10 — Twitter, which gobbled up $139 million.
Medical tourism falling far short of expectations: Despite once being hailed as the wave of the future, medical tourism hasn’t come anywhere close to matching expectations, and thus those expectations are being ratcheted down, the American Medical Association News reports. Projections that medical tourists would number 20 million by 2015 have been abandoned, with analysts now predicting that medial tourism will come nowhere near that number — when it comes to Americans heading overseas for medical care, that is. A Deloitte Center for Health Solutions survey found that the number of Americans traveling internationally for medical care dropped 28 percent to 540,000 in 2008, compared with the prior year.
The reason is a predictable one that the industry has yet to overcome: “discomfort with the idea of traveling long distances to strange places for care that patients aren’t sure will meet U.S. standards,” AMA news reports. Far from causing a “mass exodus” from the U.S. health care market, medical tourism will always be a niche industry, analysts say.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
The cell phone-cancer debate rears its head: A Maine legislator and San Francisco’s mayor are leading the charge to require warning stickers on cell phones that would alert users to cancer risk, the Associated Press reports. The Maine bill would require manufacturers to place labels on phones and packaging that warn of the potential for brain cancer associated with electromagnetic radiation. The San Francisco bill would require the display of the “absorption rate,” or level of radiofrequency energy, next to each phone, in at least as large print as the phone’s price, the AP reports.
There’s only one problem with this, writes John Timmer at Ars Technica: There’s little evidence that cell phones actually, you know, increase the likelihood of developing brain cancer.
Cell phones emit radiation in an area of the spectrum that isn’t capable of rearranging the chemical bonds of biological systems unless intensely focused (which they’re not). … There’s no obvious connection between mild heating and any obvious health issues, meaning there’s no clear mechanism linking cell phones with health problems.
The Federal Communications Commission, for its part, maintains that all cell phones sold in the U.S. are safe.
The appeal of foot powder: French pharmaceuticals giant Sanofi-Aventis’ $1.9 billion acquisition of U.S. consumer products maker Chattem Inc. is illustrative of the measures big pharma companies will need to take as generics will continue to take a bite out of their prescription-drug sales. Expect more pharma deals for companies similar to Chattem, which sells Gold Bond foot powder, Icy Hot pain reliever and Unisom sleep aid, as more and more former cash-cow drugs lose patent protection, according to the always-informative Wall Street Journal Health Blog. NPR further explains why, to big pharma, mundane consumer products couldn’t be sexier:
Those consumer medicines may not be quite as profitable as prescription blockbusters, but they’re not vulnerable to generics, aren’t subject to price negotiations with insurers and consumers tend to buy them, in good times and bad.
