Apple and Facebook were the first major companies to offer egg freezing as a benefit for their female employees two years ago. Earlier this year, Pentagon, in a rather unexpected move to retain troops, launched an initiative that pays for both sperm and egg freezing. This procedures cost anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 (and another $10,000 for in vitro fertilisation or IVF), but now a new startup, Prelude Fertility, is armed with $200 million and a mission to take egg freezing mainstream. The company’s value proposition is rather simple: the Prelude Method will consist of 4 steps. Firstly, the egg will be frozen and preserved, then the embryo will be created when the woman is ready, with a consequent comprehensive genetic screening to exclude congenital diseases and chromosomal abnormalities, and lastly Prelude will ensure so-called the ‘single embryo transfer’, a procedure to virtually eliminate the chances of conceiving twins or triplets, a risky possibility of IVF. Single embryo transfer is possible due to embryo imaging technology, which will also improve the success rate for the best candidates for implantation (the majority of women have a 20% to 35% success rate).
The man behind the Prelude Fertility is Martin Varsavsky, a serial entrepreneur with six successful creations under his belt. His most successful ventures are probably Jazztel founded in 1998 and now Spain’s second largest publicly traded telecom operator and Fon – the largest WiFi network in the world. Prelude Fertility is his seventh venture and coincidentally, the first Prelude baby is Martin’s seventh child.
Prelude Fertility is targeting women in their late 20s and mid-30s, offering them a world where their decisions about family and career are not ruled by their biological clocks. The company is going to offer the procedure for a lower upfront price, however the egg preservation will be quite expensive – starting at $199 a month. This is a revolutionary pricing strategy for the infertility industry, a sort of razor-blade model if you will.
However, Prelude Fertility is not the first startup to target this industry. In 2015 Progyny, the self-proclaimed ‘Uber of the fertility industry’, was created through the merger of Fertility Authority, a NYC-based fertility matching and financing service and Auxogyn a fertility tech firm. Progyny offers an app where patients can find doctors and book appointments and even arrange the financing. Moreover, for large companies Progyny offers complete fertility preservation solution packages as benefits to their employees.
Another NYC-based tech company, Celmatix, uses big data and predictive analytics to help women understand and utilise their fertility potential to the maximum. Through collaboration with fertility clinics, the company is able to obtain valuable clinical data and, while basing the models on more than 200,000 treatment cycles, offer an impressive 80% accuracy of its models. With these models, doctors can recommend better treatments based on their effectiveness for the patient’s demographic peers.
Considering how lucrative the fertility industry is, projected to reach $21.6 billion globally by 2020 with more than 10% annual growth, it is safe to assume that more and more tech startups will be targeting this industry. There are many ways in which they can help this industry, mainly big data analytics can help with predicting the likelihood of pregnancy through various methods.
But will one of them be the leader in fertility industry and stop the biological clocks for good?
Project Loon: When balloons learn how not to float away!
24
September
2016
No ratings yet.Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/project-loon-google-brings-ai-skies/
Artificial intelligence isn’t always intelligent
We all got excited when we heard about Google planning to launch balloons into the stratosphere to provide Internet in regions where it is otherwise unavailable. However, we have not heard much about any progress.
This summer Google X Lab, or just X as it is known under the Alphabet’s umbrella, launched a balloon into the stratosphere over Peru where is stayed for 98 days. This is an impressive achievement given that much like regular balloons, the balloons of Lab X have one big problem – they tend to float away.
The navigation system that scientists at X use allows them to only move the balloons up and down, while pumping air into a balloon inside the balloon or pumping the air out — just like hot air balloons. One reason for this is the fact that a more complex navigation system would probably prove to be too heavy for the balloons. Taken this big limitation into account, the scientists had to search for other solutions.
Given the recent success another Google spin-off had lately with AlphaGo, an AI system that beat one of the world’s best player at the Chinese game of Go, the project Loon turned to artificial intelligence. To ensure the victory for the AlphaGo system, the scientists used reinforcement learning. When the system learned how to play Go by analysing human moves, it then played game after game, analysed its success and used this data to improve its behaviour. Following the vision of the creators of AlphaGo, reinforcement learning started to being used for various other tasks, including Project Loon.
To demonstrate the progress of the algorithms, it is sufficient to note that the balloons were navigated by handcrafted algorithms that were not able to react to the uncertainty that the balloons were facing in stratosphere. They were able to respond only to a predetermined set of variables, like altitude, location, wind speed, etc. Thus, there would be a chance of the balloon floating away over the ocean if it was exposed to an extreme situation, which the algorithm did not account for. However now, with the help of reinforcement learning the balloons are using all those different scenarios they have encountered in order to improve their behaviour and navigation in the future. After collecting data on over 17 million kilometres of balloon flights, the navigation system can more effectively predicting the course balloon should take, whether it should move the balloon up or down. While these predictions are not always perfect, they represent a starting point of a new large shift across the tech world as a whole.
What do you think, are we going to have an internet balloon during our next hike in the mountains?
Technology of the Week – Disrupting the Healthcare
16
September
2016
No ratings yet.
Team Number: 8
Health, Do you Care?
According to Forbes, the Healthcare industry is the world’s largest sector today, three times bigger than banking, however it has not seen the rapid digitisation other industries have undergone in the past decades. Consequently, the industry is making up for it by transforming itself, at an unprecedented rate, never seen before. The inelasticity of demand for healthcare has traditionally enabled the supply to have sufficient funds for extended research. For these reasons, we have decided to focus on the disruptiveness of e-heath and virtual platforms.
Three common success factors identify the disruptors in healthcare: they cure diseases; they transform the typical practices of medicine and their technology can also be sustaining. We analysed if the technologies we chose are really industry disruptors.
A new phenomenon is telehealth which is the delivery of virtual health care. Accenture is estimating it to become a billion-dollar industry, with virtual doctor visits surpassing traditional ones in the foreseeable future. An example of a telehealth is Healthtap, a company that started with a free question-and-answer website, that connects patients with licensed physicians across the US. Currently, according to their figures, they estimate to serve has 10 million users. They have evolved their e-platform and offer a premium on demand service, that allows patients to video call with a doctor for a monthly subscription fee. HealthTap has raised $35.5 million in funding and is expected to grow rapidly, as the popularity of the app continues to rise.
However, with its strict regulations and constant scrutiny, the healthcare industry does not tolerate deceit. Theranos is a biotech company that Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford dropout, founded in 2003 with plans to revolutionise the blood-testing market – a market which an annual turnover of $75 billion. Only recently, the company was the darling of the most successful venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. Currently, investors lost some or all of their $700 million investments, while the net worth of Holmes has been diminished from $4.5 billion to nothing.
It seems like eliminating the middleman, in this case the doctors, was the disruption of the lab testing industry. But apparently it was also the company’s biggest mistake. Theranos’ business model is built on the idea that it can offer more than 240 simple blood tests directly to patients at a much lower cost than traditional blood labs, with its own technology. However, they have not been able to live up to the promise and only a handful of tests were conducted via their Edison machinery.
A cooperation disruption was in the form of a partnership with Walgreens. By opening blood collection centres in Walgreens, the second-largest chain of pharmaceutical companies in the US, they effectively established a distribution chain, which was unheard of for a blood-test company.
Nevertheless, after The Wall Street Journal first made allegations that the company was, in effect, a sham – citing a former employee, now the regulators have revoked firm’s license to operate a lab in California due to unsafe practices and Holmes is banned from the blood-testing business for at least two years.
These two intricate examples in this blog make you wonder if technology is making the health industry more effective or pushing doctors away from patients.
As an addition to the analysis of these two companies, interviews were conducted with stakeholders whom are directly impacted by the advancements in this industry: doctors and medical students. They provided ideas on how the future of healthcare will look like.
Carreyrou, J. (2015). Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology. [online] WSJ. Available at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901 [Accessed 12 Sep. 2016].
Chase, D. (2016). Why 98% of Digital Health Startups Are Zombies And What They Can Do About It. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davechase/2016/05/18/why-98-of-digital-health-startups-are-zombies-and-what-they-can-do-about-it/#49e3c10b68f3 [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].
Das, R. (2015). The Companies Disrupting Healthcare In 2015. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reenitadas/2015/06/11/top-companies-disrupting-healthcare-in-2015/#1a108f8318a4 [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].
Dvorsky, G. (2015). The Makers of That “Miracle” Needle-Free Blood Test Are On The Defensive. [online] Gizmodo.com. Available at: http://gizmodo.com/the-makers-of-that-miracle-needle-free-blood-test-are-1738057269 [Accessed 16 Sep. 2016].
Healthcare For Here or To Go?. (2015). 1st ed. [ebook] Accenture. Available at: https://www.accenture.com/t20151120T024431__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Dualpub_25/Accenture-Healthcare-for-Here-or-to-Go-v2.pdf#zoom=50 [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].
HealthTap. (2016). HealthTap Account Basics: Free and Premi…. [online] Available at: https://healthtap.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1448862-healthtap-account-basics-free-and-premium-services [Accessed 12 Sep. 2016].
Herper, M. (2016). From $4.5 Billion To Nothing: Forbes Revises Estimated Net Worth Of Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2016/06/01/from-4-5-billion-to-nothing-forbes-revises-estimathttp://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2016/06/01/from-4-5-billion-to-nothing-forbes-revises-estimated-net-worth-of-theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes/ed-net-worth-of-theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes/ [Accessed 12 Sep. 2016].
Loria, K. (2015). Here’s what we know about how Theranos’ ‘revolutionary’ technology works. [online] Tech Insider. Available at: http://www.techinsider.io/how-theranos-revolutionary-technology-works-2015-10 [Accessed 13 Sep. 2016].
Nam, S. (2016). What’s disruptive and what’s not? Three criteria for identifying disruptors in healthcare | Christensen Institute. [online] Christenseninstitute.org. Available at: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/whats-disruptive-and-whats-not-three-criteria-for-identifying-disruptors-in-healthcare/ [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].
Olson, P. (2014). HealthTap Offers Uber-Like Service For Seeing A Doctor. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/07/30/healthtap-offers-uber-like-service-for-seeing-a-doctor/#39db7b6c54fb [Accessed 15 Sep. 2016].
Ottolini, M. (2015). How To Separate Truly Disruptive Technologies From The Posers. [online] CRN. Available at: http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/video/300077862/how-to-separate-truly-disruptive-technologies-from-the-posers.htm [Accessed 13 Sep. 2016].
Sonnenfeld, J. and Wadhwa, V. (2016). Theranos teaches Silicon Valley a hard lesson about accountability. [online] Washington Post. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/23/theranos-teaches-silicon-valley-a-hard-lesson-about-accountability/ [Accessed 12 Sep. 2016].
Taylor, B. (2015). The Worst Tech Startup Failures of 2015 – Bold. [online] Bold. Available at: http://bold.global/ben-taylor/2016/01/05/the-top-11-startups-that-died-in-2015/ [Accessed 13 Sep. 2016].
