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Meet Neurotrack, the winning health startup at SXSW

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:59:59 +0000

Neurotrack, the startup that took the health prize at this week’s SXSW startup accelerator in Austin, isn’t just a few months or a few years in the making. Elli Kaplan, the company’s CEO, said it’s built on research started 25 years ago.

That’s when neuroscientists at UC San Diego started the research that would lead to discoveries about how the brain is impacted by Alzheimer’s and possible methods of early detection. Over the years, that research led to multi-million-dollar grants and longitudinal studies and, ultimately, the recognition that it could become much more.

“They realized the impact outside the ivory tower and they brought me in,” Kaplan said. Last spring, the company incorporated and, after a summer at health tech accelerator Rock Health’s Boston program, it launched in October.

Building on work from neuroscientists Stuart Zola, Elizabeth Buffalo, Eugene Agichtein and Cecelia Manzanares (now at Emory University) and theories regarding short-term memory and recognition memory, Neurotrack says it can identify patients at risk for developing Alzheimer’s potentially 6 years before the onset of the condition.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s – and that number is expected to rise to 16 million by 2050. But, Kaplan said, most are diagnosed at a late stage.

“It’s the same thing as what happened with breast cancer before they had the mammogram,” she said. “They’re diagnosing at the equivalent of stage 4, when there’s already irreparable damage.”

Through a computer-based program connected to an eye-tracking device, patients are monitored as they view pairs of images, some of which are novel and some of which are familiar. The program evaluates patients’ eye movement and the time spent looking at the familiar and novel images and then generates a score. Kaplan said that of those who have scored below 50 percent on the test, 100 percent have gone on to receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis within six years, while none of those scoring above 67 have converted Alzheimer’s.

Down the line, the company could sell to physicians (after receiving FDA approval), but Kaplan said the immediate plan is to sell to pharmaceutical companies, who can use the test to identify people for clinical trials and develop more effective treatment.

“One of the biggest issues with Alzheimer’s is that pharmaceutical companies haven’t been able to develop drugs because they can’t diagnose the condition early enough,” she said.

The company, which is based in Atlanta, has not yet raised funding from venture capitalists but is currently raising an insitutional round. Other interesting health startups that competed in the SXSW accelerator include Docphin, a Rock Health and Startup Health-backed site for healthcare professionals to access and share medical research, TechStars-backed Careport Health, which helps hospitals find appropriate after-care for patients and Care at Hand, another Rock Health company, a mobile system that helps non-clinical home care workers monitor and communicate the health of elderly patients.

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Why data is the key to better medicine — and maybe a cure for cancer

Derrick Harris — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:07:19 +0000

The health care industry might have embraced the big data movement with open arms, but embracing it with open data probably would be more effective. Hospital organizations, researchers and the tech companies serving them have lots of great ideas — and have achieved some great results, too — but, ultimately, efforts to use big data to transform the industry will only be as good as the data these stakeholders have to work with. Right now, that isn’t always everything they need.

Have access, will innovate

Wired published an interesting profile Tuesday morning that exemplifies what’s possible when smart people have access to good data. The piece showcases the work of a man named Fred Trotter who has accessed reams of buried Medicare data via a Freedom of Information Act request and is uncovering some potentially valuable information. Already, the article explains, he has built a “Doctor Social Graph” by analyzing some “60 million relationships between doctors, and how often they refer patients to one another.” His next mission is to build a doctor rating system based on data he’s uncovered about credentials, nursing home inspections and other relevant info.

Elsewhere, companies such as Palo Alto, Calif., startup Apixio are trying to make hospitals more efficient by using semantic analysis to connect the dots between patient charts, electronic medical records, billing data and whatever other sources of information that hospitals generate. (We covered Apixio in early 2011, although the company has significantly expanded its services since then.) In health care, everyone seems to have their own way of doing things, as Apixio natural-language-processing scientist Vishnu Vyas told me recently, so “the variety of the data becomes as important as the volume of the data.”

Linda Drumright, GM of the Clinical Trial Optimization Solutions group at IMS Health, agreed. She explained that her company is able to do its job because it has access to mountains of data from pharmacies, insurance claims, medical records, partners and other sources. All told, it houses 17 petabytes of data spread across 5,000 databases. Her division’s clients, which generally include pharmaceutical and biotech companies running patient trials, need all this data in order to ensure their trials will actually be successful.

One recent customer wasn’t able to recruit test subjects fast enough, she noted, and IMS helped it comb through its criteria about who to or not to include in the trial only to find “that the patient population they were looking for didn’t exist.” As IMS went back and began eliminating criteria and iterating design, it realized that trial never should have begun in the first place.

There are a million ways to think about how to use this data, Drumright said, and as more customers begin to fully understand what they can do with it, her goal is to “make this information accessible in a way where it’s easy at the point where it’s needed, and consumable where it’s needed.”

The key to curing cancer might be more data

But whatever Trotter, Apixio, IMS and others accomplish will have been made possible because they have access to some valuable datasets, albeit not always with great ease. Many individuals who’d like to improve the health care system — if not our health, generally — aren’t so lucky. Take, for example, the world’s genetic researchers. It’s very possible the data they need to discover the medical Holy Grail of a cure for cancer is locked in gene sequence data that only very few people will ever see.

David Haussler

According to University of California, Santa Cruz researcher David Haussler, the limited access that many geneticists and computer scientists like himself have to valuable genetic data is “a crime.”

“We are on the brink of a real new understanding of cancer by being able to sequence cancer genomes,” he told me during a recent interview, but big data will be the key to unlocking it.

There are 1.6 million cases of cancer in the United States every year, Haussler explained, and most of the information from those tumors is being ignored. This is partially because of privacy restrictions about who can access personal medical data and for what purposes, and partially because there isn’t yet a concerted effort to collect the necessary genetic samples. As genome sequencing gets faster and cheaper, he says researchers need access to healthy and cancerous samples from the same person — and as many of these samples as possible — in order to analyze the “astounding” number of molecular changes that occur in every type and variation of cancer.

“We can’t completely understand what we’ll find, but we know we the only way we’ll pull out signal from the noise is to [analyze all these genes],” Haussler said.

Haussler understands the need for privacy regulations, but thinks there’s an opportunity to at least ease some current restrictions on how researchers access data. Even when there are relatively large (if not ideal) datasets available such as with the Cancer Genome Atlas project, researchers must apply to the National Institutes of Health for access, and the data must always remain behind an organizational firewall. Every cancer patient in the country could agree to having their data available to researchers, he said, but as long as that data isn’t accessible over the internet it’s only of limited utility.

He — along with others in the field — thinks cloud computing could be the solution because it gives genetic researchers a central location where they can access and perform computations on the data. Haussler and his team that house the Cancer Genome Atlas and a couple other projects currently have more than 400 terabytes of data and expect to have around 5 petabytes of data eventually. Downloading that is infeasible save for access to high-speed research networks, so “we need a place where people can experiment with these big data problems,” Haussler said.

In the meantime, Haussler and his peers will keep on collecting and accessing genome data however they can. And they’ll keep building software packages and algorithms that analyze that data better and faster than ever before. However, he lamented, “If we had the big data out there in an unrestricted setting, then all the best minds in the world would already be crunching on it.”

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Alliance Health Networks tackles the low-hanging fruit of medicine and data

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 21:22:33 +0000

The combination of information technology and medicine has led to hundreds of startups and another round of excitement for modernizing the way we diagnose patients, track illness and even administer care. There are efforts to build a tricorder, plans to track millions of people’s heartbeats to create a data set for cardiac care and even remote intensive-care units that help keep people safer in the emergency room.

But outside of some whiz-bang technical stuff, there are also hundreds of million of people with access to the internet and a desire to get more information about something as esoteric as PHACE syndrome or as common as depression. Add thousands of medical research papers and descriptions about diseases and treatments available via the National Library of Medicine for free, and you have a business opportunity.

Making meaning from medical research

When Jay Bartot and Derek Streat decided started Medify in 2010 the goal was to use those free research papers to train a machine learning algorithms how to deliver intelligible information to health queries from the masses. Bartot, who had co-founded Farecast, a startup that built a predictive algorithm to tell users the best time to buy airplane tickets, decided to take his knowledge of prediction to the health world ~~after his own family’s brush with a medical problem~~.

In May, Medify was purchased by Alliance Health Networks a Salt Lake City, Utah-based startup that has built out a community of 1.5 million people who gather to discuss diseases and medical conditions. Now, with Medify on board and a community of people whose discussions about health are also a great source of data, Alliance Health is seeing how mining unstructured data from professionals and patients alike can help improve heath.

Medify had used the National Library of Medicine to build out ontologies that it uses to “teach” the algorithms to understand medical terminology and treatment plans, and has then built up a user interface around those algorithms. Like IBM has found with Watson, its supercomputer that has found a role helping doctors diagnose illnesses based on symptoms, medicine is a good place for this type of data mining.

The goal is to take the ontologies learned from Medify and combine its algorithms with what people discuss in Alliance Health’s communities. Then, Alliance can apply new algorithms to see who in the community is offering the best advice, understand how patients influence and inspire each other, and then help pharmaceutical companies and even doctors understand and influence how patients make medical decisions.

Getting value from big data doesn’t have to be a big undertaking.

It’s actually a great example of how thinking about big data doesn’t have to be as complicated as using a supercomputer and expensive clinical research filter through algorithms to help doctors diagnose illnesses. Streat says the company’s data is only in the low-terabyte range and they process it using Amazon Web Services, including EC2 and Elastic MapReduce. They add new data every day and refresh their machine learning algorithms weekly, if not every few days.

There’s a place for these simpler solutions, and by bringing together a community and providing it with information, Alliance Health might become a company much like Spiceworks is in the IT space — able to both monetize and help a community of niche users in a way that benefits everyone. For example, a company that makes a new diabetes test might pay to sponsor the diabetes channel on Alliance or may even pay to find out who the big influencers are in the forums associated with that channel. If done correctly, users might even welcome sponsored how-tos or better information delivered about a new drug or device.

Streat explained that as far as medicine and data-combining go, there are many efforts around devices and even fancier data sets. However, he’s confident that even with something like expensive clinical data that’s locked behind paywalls, just being able to direct people to better answers and give them a sense of community is a good place to start.

Investors seem to think it’s a decent bet as well. Alliance Health has raised $20 million since it’s founding in 2006 from investors such as New World Ventures, Physic Ventures, Epic Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures.

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More Proof: Businesses Like iPad

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:10:39 +0000

During the last Apple conference call, Steve Jobs crowed about Apple’s growing enterprise presence. Today, a new report illustrates just how well iOS in particular is doing in business; 4,000 new iPads and iPhones are ready to be put to use at a major pharmaceutical company, the report says.

Issued by OpenTrust, a software security provider that was tasked with creating a secure network for the devices, the report doesn’t reveal which pharmaceutical company is bringing in the Apple hardware. It does note that the new customer has a large international presence, spanning more than 100 countries, and claiming more than 100,000 employees worldwide. That’s right around Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline territory, in case you were wondering.

Apple touted its presence within top companies last Wednesday, when Jobs noted during the conference call that the iPhone is being piloted or deployed by 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies, while the iPad has presence at 66 percent.

The OpenTrust announcement reveals some interesting usage information about how iOS devices are operating in corporate IT, too. The company’s focus seems to have been on enabling secure remote access for distributed employees dialing in from abroad. If remote workforces are pushing the enterprise drive toward iOS adoption, then that’s promising news for Apple, as the number of employees who commute virtually is on the rise.

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